Abydos Boats, Umm El-Qaab, Kochab, Stars, Cepheus, Ursa Minor, Ursa Major, Cassiopeia, Draco

Question: Why have we titled this posting "Abydos Boats, Umm El-Qaab, KKB, Kochab, Stars, Cepheus, Ursa Minor, Ursa Major, Cassiopeia, Draco and the Mother of Pots of Mainstream Bad Archaeology Lost in Yesteryear"?

Answer: Because the ancient predynastic Pharaonic Egyptian funerary site Umm El-Qaab epitomizes the wayward wrong path that mainstream Archaeology and related disciplines have been taking since their inception in their misunderstanding of the nature of the early history of Ancient Egypt.
The historical disciplines, lost in pots, have totally missed their boats, as it were, by failing viz. refusing to ask the simple question of whether much of what has been found in prehistory could be related to ancient religious beliefs as tied to the veneration of the stars above -- "in heaven" as it were.

According to current mainstream dogma, the name of Umm El-Qaab viz. Umm El Gaʻab, is (erroneously) traced to the Arabic term qa-ab "small bowl" and thus the site name is transliterated "Mother of Pots" because of all the ancient pot sherds found in the area and purportedly arising from offerings to the gods. But why here? People in Egyptology call their current view "science". We call it "folk etymology" and unsubstantiated guessing.

Aimo Edvard (Edward) Murtonen (1924-1996),
often written simplified with the initial A. Murtonen, formerly Department of Middle Eastern Studies, University of Melbourne, who was a student of Paul E. Kahle, University of Bonn, Germany,
in Section Bb, page 226 of
Hebrew in Its West Semitic Setting: A Comparative Survey of Non-Masoretic Hebrew Dialects and Traditions. Part 1. A Comparative Lexicon Volume 3 Sections Bb. Root System: Comparative Material and Discussions. Sections C, D and E: Numerals under 100, Pronouns and Particles, Hebrew MaterialSeries: Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics, a massive work described as "This ... lexical part of the work ... contains comparative material to the root system from cognate languages, including sixteen Semitic and three Cushitic fairly well represented languages as well as Tuareg, Hausa, old Egyptian and Coptic quoted systematically; Omotic; Berber other than Tuareg, and Chadic other than Hausa likewise as groups; other Semitic and Cushitic less regularly; etymological and semantic comments follow dictionary entries; phonological discussion, including an attempt at the determination of pre-Semitic phonemes on the basis of actual attestation, is mainly concentrated in the introduction...."

has the following entry for the consonantal combination "KB":

"Phoen /kkb/ star; Ug /kbkb/ (pl. /kbkbm/, /kkbm/) =; Aram /ko^wkb/ = ; Syr /kawkb/ = ; Amor /kabkab/ = ; Akk /kakkab/ = ; Arab /kawkab/ =, constellation; ESA /kwkb/ star .... Etymology uncertain; Aram etc. /kbb/ seems to mean primarily roasting rather than just burning...."

The above term has its Indo-European comparable, e.g. Latvian kūp- kūpt, written by Mühlenbachs-Endzelins as kûpt, kûpstu, kûpu meaning "qualmen, dampfen, rauchen" ... with the variants kvēp-, kvēpu "qualmen, rauchen". In English the best translation is perhaps a "fuming fire", as the ancients apparently originally viewed the stars, i.e. as red-hot wood-burning campfires.

Adding to our previous postings on the Abydos Boats as marking stars at the Harbor of Cepheus ...

• Why the Abydos Boats Were Docked at the "Harbor" of Cepheus, and 
• Abydos Boats and Enclosures Mark the Stars of Cepheus, One of the Argonauts Immortalized in the Stars: Are These The Boats of Jason and his Minyans?,

... we can now view that central portion of the starry sky in a larger context at Abydos as follows, demonstrating that Umm El-Qaab marks the stars of Ursa Minor (with Qaab arguably specifically equivalent to Kochab) ... the curving Processional Way marking the stars of Draco and arguably the North Celestial Pole. In addition, the stars of Ursa Major and Cassiopeia are also marked on the ground surface in hermetic fashion by edifices, i.e. "as above, so below". Here is our composite decipherment of Abydos and Umm El-Qaab as marking the stars at the center of heaven and thus being the funerary center of predynastic Egypt. There are three images -- 1) the ground plan, 2) the corresponding stars, and 3) the composite ground plan and sky.

Image 1 (below): Abydos and Umm El-Qaab Ground Plan

Image 2 (below): Abydos and Umm El-Qaab Corresponding Stars

Image 3 (below): THE COMPOSITE DECIPHERMENT IMAGE
Abydos and Umm El-Qaab Composite Ground Plan and Sky

(Please click on the image to obtain a larger graphic)

We thus do not have the banal "Mother of Pots" at Umm El-Qaab, as the pot-geeked archaeologists and related professions would have us believe, but rather, we have the "Father of Fumes", as it were, the Midheaven of Stars.

Since the astronomical nature of Abydos is thus made quite crystal clear by this decipherment, all the disciplines involved in trying to understand mankind's ancient history will have to abandon the misunderstood paths they have been following up to now, and will now have to follow the true hermetic path, "as above, so below". That is the origin of our (humankind's) "heavenly" beliefs, indeed, long before the Pharaohs.