The origins of the zodiac — a 360° division of the ecliptic into twelve equal segments of 30° each, associated with specific constellations and their animal or human symbols — remain incompletely explained by the historical record. The Babylonian MUL.APIN tablets (c. 1000 BCE) present the system in near-complete form, with limited evidence of gradual evolutionary development from the textual record alone. This paper proposes a geo-mythological hypothesis: that the Awash River's paleogeomorphology in the Afar Depression of Ethiopia provided a terrestrial template for the twelve-fold zodiacal division, with the river's twelve major paleo-meander bends constituting near-uniform 30.0° ± 0.15° azimuthal steps across the river's approximately 1,223-kilometre course. Each bend is characterised by a dominant ecological and landform signature — volcanic structure, lake system, animal behaviour, or seasonal hydrological event — that corresponds structurally to the canonical zodiacal symbol associated with the relevant 30° sector. Stellar alignment calculations using Astropy v6.1 with ERFA IAU 2006/2000A precession-nutation models demonstrate that four royal stars (Aldebaran, Regulus, Antares, Fomalhaut) produce best-fit alignments to the geomorphic anchors at a common precession epoch, and that solar gate alignments at equinoxes and solstices correspond to four of the twelve bend transitions. The dating of the proposed observation system is explicitly treated as a hypothesis requiring independent archaeological verification rather than as a conclusion derived from the stellar calculations. The paper presents the geomorphological and ecological correspondences as the primary evidence, with the stellar alignments as supporting but not independently sufficient data, and proposes systematic archaeoastronomical survey of the Awash basin as the most direct test of the hypothesis.
Diogo Azevedo Oliveira Sennfelt (2026) studied this question.