Every year, with the arrival of the floods and the rising of the Nile, the feast of Opet was celebrated in Ancient Egypt, a spectacular ceremony full of mystery in the city of Thebes, former capital of the country. In this procession, the statues of their most sacred gods were transported in wooden boats through a route known as the ‘Avenue of the Sphinxes’.
In total, 2,700 meters guarded by more than 1,000 sphinxes that connect the Karnak religious complex and the Luxor temple. An avenue through which, on this Thursday night, history has walked again. The passing of the centuries and urban development have been burying this walk of the gods, until now. Because in Luxor, ancient Thebes, the feast of Opet has been recreated.
With her they wanted to celebrate the end of the restoration of the Avenue of the Sphinxes. After several decades, Egypt has completed reconstruction work on an avenue rediscovered in the 1940s by archaeologists. Fireworks, ancestral dances and sounds almost from the past have rescued a celebration that now asks the gods for the arrival of tourists. And it is that in the Opet party they went out in procession statues of the gods Amun-Ra, his wife Mut and their son, Jonsu.
This ceremony, which represented the regeneration of Amun-Re (the main deity of Ancient Egypt) and, therefore, of the pharaoh himself, was carried out during some times along the Nile and in others along the avenue, which at that time ran in parallel to the river. Precisely, this avenue It was the largest project of its kind that archaeologists and experts have been working on since 1949 with interruptions, according to the Ministry of Antiquities.
The path was covered by houses for a long time, but it was cleared and recovered, as were some of the statues, although not all of them have been saved: a total of 120 sphinxes, 10% of which the route originally had, return to Be in someone’s place, although many of them are incomplete.
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