Covered in Sand for Centuries, Egypt Reopens 3,000-Year-Old Avenue of Sphinxes in Glitzy Ceremony

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Egypt has reopened a sacred street lined with hundreds of statues on Thursday, which was used as a procession route for the gods 3,000 years in the past.

Referred to as the Avenue of Sphinxes, this 1.7-mile stretch options greater than 1,050 statues of sphinxes and rams that join the Temples of Karnak within the north with Luxor within the south.

Mohamed Abd el-Badei, a high Egyptian archeology officers, mentioned the oldest ruins alongside the pathway are six buildings constructed by Queen Hatshepsut, Egypt’s solely girl pharaoh, that date to 1400 BC.

The pathway, paved in sandstone blocks, was used yearly for a pageant referred to as ‘Opet’ that was held the second month of the Nile flooding seasons.

Hieroglyphics on the partitions of one of many temples state the vacation was marked by parades and dancers in celebration of the bounty flooding dropped at the fields.

Clergymen carried three divine boats on their shoulders, transporting statues of the Theban Triad — the deities of Amun-Re, his consort Mut and their son Khonsu from one finish to the opposite.

The glitzy ceremony started at at 12:30pm, with President Abdel Fatah el-Sissi reenacting of an historical vacation, together with different senior officers.

Lots of of singers and dancers carrying conventional historical Egyptian clothes walked out of the Temple of Karnak in an excellent procession that some participates carrying large golden boats on their shoulders simply as monks did hundreds of years in the past.

The complete walkway was recognized from 1984 to 2000, which led to a big excavation of the location.

Nonetheless, this meant a whole bunch of houses, mosques and a 115-year-old Evangelical church needed to be demolished to revive the Avenue of the Sphinxes.

A lot of the unique statues have been recovered and are depicted in three completely different shapes, with the primary being a physique of a lion with a ram’s head that was constructed over a virtually 1,000-foot space between the Karnak Temple and the Precinct of Mut through the reign of New Kingdom ruler Tutankhamen, who dominated about 3,300 years in the past.