After decades of excavation and restoration efforts, in southern Egypt, precisely at the city of Luxor on the east bank of the Nile River, a 3,000-year-old Avenue of Sphinxes has reopened for the public on Thursday, November 25, 2021. It was once an ancient road upper the north of Nile river named “The Path of God”. The walkway which connects the Temple of Luxor with the Temple of Karnak was covered by sand over the centuries, and now Egypt revived a new cultural tradition after several thousand years. The ceremony has been held magnificently and glitzy along with the Twibbonize frame below;
Luxor Sphinx Avenue Ceremony – by Eyad Farah
Link: https://twb.nz/eyadartist
It was started in 1949, an Egyptian archaeologist, Zakaria Ghineim discovered the first eight sphinx statues in front of the Luxor Temple. That road with 1,7 miles long and about 250 feet wide must go through any political upheaval and civil unrest for seven decades to be reopened.
A stage of spectacular public event, the Luxor Sphinx Avenue Ceremony has been held on Thursday. A spectacular parade began after nightfall in Egypt and around lunchtime ET proceeded along the length of the avenue. Over 600 ram-headed statues with a lion’s body and a human’s head, and traditional sphinxes lined on either side of the avenue. The participants of this march were in pharaonic dress, a symphony orchestra, lighting effects, professional dancers, boats on the Nile, horse-drawn carriages, and more.
The event tried to recreate the spirit of the ancient Opet festival and will include music, dancing, and light shows. This is also a part of the ongoing promotion of archeological discoveries as Egypt tries to revive its flagging tourism industry. The President of Egypt, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi also attended the city-wide spectacle. However, the Egyptians should thank the archaeologists who brought the road back into the light of day.
The sacred road is lined on both sides with more than 1,050 statues of sphinxes and rams. Now, the road is believed to be built to celebrate the annual Opet Festival as it was in the past at the time of the Pharaohs in Luxor to promote fertility and included a procession that carried a statue of ceremonial gods from Karnak Temple to Luxor Temple. The festival is held in the second month of the Nile flooding season.
There are millennia-old monuments that sit along the fertile Nile River Valley in Egypt, a country of the pharaohs that linked northeast Africa with the Middle East. However, Luxor is the great capital of Upper Egypt during the New Kingdom, the god Amun-Ra, a city with the largest open museums in the world, and was the ancient city of Thebes.
