The determination of the stars to which some of the Egyptian temples, sacred to a
known divinity, were directed, opened a way to a study, of the astronomical basis
of parts of the Egyptian mythologies. It became obvious that the mythology was
intensely astronomical, and crystallized early ideas suggested by actual
observation of the Sun, Moon, and stars. The excavations revealed that several
times in its history the complex had been razed to the ground to be re-erected and expanded on the same spot, yet each time with a slight change of orientation. The
orientation of the temples must have been determined by certain stars, whose
position in the sky changed over time, and this orientation was so quintessential that the temples of the earlier complexes had to be re-erected several times. It was
not dilapidation that motivated the repeated construction work, but a religious
necessity to follow the stars in the orientation of the temples. This is explained by
the temples having been rebuilt upon old foundations, a thing which can be proved
to have occurred. In the case of the Egyptian temples, the stated date of foundation
of a temple is almost always long after that at which its lines were laid down in
accordance with the astronomical ritual. No wonder, then, that the same thing is
noticed in Greece.

—From the N.Y.Sun,March,1894.

This new series of works, are related to a study from J.Norman Locker, a pioneer in the fields of astrophysics and astro-archeology, of the Temple Worship and Mythology of the Ancient Egyptians, described in the book The Dawn of Astronomy firstly published in 1894 by Casesell and Company in London.
J. Norman Locker believed that ancient Egyptian monuments were constructed “in strict relation to the stars”. This study, which has being the inspiration for this new series of work by Catalina Swinburn, following her previous one about archeology pieces displaced from their original sites from the Fertile Crescent, explores the relationship between astronomy and architecture in the age of the pharaohs and beyond.