Luxor The festival temple

karnac karnak Night life Luxor night 3

This was a festival Temple, where people gathered to celebrate the passing of one year and the coming of a new year.

Many festivals were celebrated in Thebes.
The Luxor Temple was the center of the most important one, the festival of Opet.
The temple's purpose was for a suitable setting for the rituals of the festival .
The festival itself was to reconcile the human aspect of the ruler with the divine office.

During the 18th Dynasty the festival lasted eleven days, but had grown to twenty-seven days by the reign of Ramses III in the 20th Dynasty.
The festival was celebrated in the second month of summer, during the annual inundation of the Nile.

At that time the festival included the distribution of over 11,000 loaves of bread, 85 cakes and 385 jars of beer.
The procession of images of the current royal family began at Karnak and ended at the Luxor Temple.

The festival process Each year, a statue of

Amun

of Karnak was carried in a procession to Luxor Temple to greet

Amun

of the Opet, Amenemopet, in a ceremony called “The Beautiful Festival of the Opet.
” The ceremony was one of the most important in

Egypt

’s religious calendar.
The procession between the temples and the ceremonies at Luxor are shown on the outer walls of the shrine/temple of Rameses III in the Great Court at Karnak and on the walls of Amenhetep III’s Colonnade at Luxor Temple.

By the late 18th Dynasty the journey was being made by barge, on the Nile River.
Each god or goddess was carried in a separate barge that was towed by smaller boats.
Large crowds consisting of soldiers, dancers, musicians and High ranking officials accompanied the barge by walking along the banks of the river.

During the festival the people were able to ask favors of the statues of the kings or to the images of the gods that were on the barges.
Once at the Temple, the King and his priests entered the back chambers.
There, the King and his ka (the divine essence of each King, created at his birth) were merged, the King being transformed into a divine being.

The people outside waiting the transformed King, would cheer wildly at his re-emergence.
This solidified the ritual and made the King a god.
The festival was the backbone of the pharaoh's government.
Among its several functions, the festival was meant to reaffirm the authority of the King, his ties to the royal ancestors, and his bonds to the gods.
It was a ceremony of royal rejuvenation and a reassertion of the gods’ power over

Egypt

.

A panoramic view of the interior of the Luxor Temple, just inside the entrance.
The mosque built over the ruins is on the left
Abu-el-Haggag
Many rulers built on to the Temple yet it always remained a place of worship for Christians and later Muslims.

During the Christian era, Within the Rameses II courtyard was a Byzantine Church built during the 6th century however it was destroyed.
The Muslims built a Mosque in the 10th century during the reign of th Ayyubid sultans, which is known as the Mosque of Abou El-Hagag.

This Ancient Luxor tradition of processions and festivals has survived.
The modern Festival of Abu-el-Haggag has retained, in modified form, many Ancient festival activities.

Who was Abu-el-Haggag ?
Abu-el-Haggag was a Moslem Sheikh who is said to have brought Islam to Luxor eight centuries ago.

To celebrate Abu-al-Haggag, each year in Shaban(the Moslem month), Luxor is transformed into a three-day-long carnival.

The festival process
There are many kinds of celebrating ceremonies .
Fruits and nuts are sold on the streets, minstrels and magicians perform, horses race up and down the Corniche, men dress as women, and women wear their fanciest clothes.
At the height of the partying, thousands of people watch as a model bark filled with gaily dressed children is paraded through town on a horse-drawn wagon from Luxor Temple toward Karnak.
Children scream, women ululate, men chant as the bark passes by.
It is a different century, a different religion, a different culture, but the Festival of Abu-el-Haggag continues the traditional forms of the Festival of Opet.