We may celebrate the new year as a chance to set goals we’ll give up in March, but the Ancient Egyptians focused their attentions on “The Coming of Sopdet”. In their culture, Sopdet was the personification of the star Sirius as an Egyptian goddess.

This star was the most important of the stars to the ancient Egyptians, as it rose just before the sun each year, immediately before the annual flooding of the Nile River. In the early First Dynasty ivory tablets, Sopdet is depicted as a cow with a plant-like emblem between her horns. Later, she would go on to be depicted as a woman, and by the Roman period, the hybrid goddess Isis-Sopdet was depicted as a woman riding side-saddle on a large dog.