Avenue of Sphinxes

LuxorEgypt

15 Jan

We find ourselves in Egypt, gazing around with awe at things made thousands of years ago

Let’s walk along a little avenue as we head back in time to take a peek at a pretty important festival on the Ancient Egyptian calendar.

Origins

The Avenue of the Sphinxes was a road built for a purpose. Believed to date back 5000 years, the avenue held all sorts of celebrations, feasts, special occasions, coronations, really anything that needed to happen between Karnak Temple and Luxor Temple, the Avenue of the Sphinxes was there to accommodate.

But the main reason for the Avenue is believed to be the annual Opet Festival that would take place in Thebes, or the name Luxor went by in the ancient times. But we’ll get into the logistics of this fascinating festival in a little bit. First let’s find out the origins of this fascinating walkway.

The construction of the Avenue is believed to have begun by Amenhotep III during the 18th Dynasty, probably around the same time he was constructing the Luxor Temple. It was also good old Amenhotep who constructed the ram’s head sphinxes to sit along the sides of the Avenue.

But the belief is that the largest part of the Avenue was done under the reign of Nectanebo I, the founder of the 30th Dynasty.

Nectanebo finished the Avenue off with statues of sphinxes of his own choosing. But things didn’t stop at a road and some sphinxes, Nectanebo also made sure to add some appropriate accessories like docks for the boats that would come up the Nile; a nilometer, which was used for measuring the water level, and some think clarity, of the Nile; wine presses for use during major celebrations; rooms for storing wine; and of course bathrooms to do your business and basins to wash.

It's also been suggested that Queen Hatshepsut had a hand in the architectural evolution of the Avenue of Sphinxes. This is a bit contested among Egyptologists but it has been recorded on her red chapel in Karnak Temple that she ordered 6 chapels dedicated to the god Amun-Re be built along the route of the Avenue, and some think that remains of these chapels have been found.

There’s even been suggestion of King Tut, having a hand in getting the Avenue started, but again, that’s pretty much conjecture at the present moment.

Whoever it was who decided to start the Avenue off, we do know for certain that it was Nectanebo I who finished it about 2400 years ago. And I’m told that when it was finished, the place didn’t look to shabby.

Avenue

The Ancient Egyptians didn’t know the road as the ‘Avenue of Sphinxes’, of course they wouldn’t, that’s the name us modern people have given the road. The Ancient Egyptians knew it as the ‘Path of God’, well not really, that’s the English translation, they would have known it in the language they spoke during the time of the Pharaohs. But it is important to keep in mind that our original understanding of the Avenue of Sphinxes was lost when the road was forgotten, and when it was rediscovered we also had to rediscover the meaning of the road and everything that it was used for.

We know the Avenue of Sphinxes to be just under 3 km long and it links the Temple of Luxor in the north with the Temple of Karnak in the south. But most interesting of all, are the over 1000 statues of sphinxes and rams that line either side of the Avenue.

The statues themselves have been catalogued as having three distinct shapes. Firstly, you have the body of a lion with the head of a ram, these ones are thought to have been built during the reign of King Tut. Second there’s the full ram statue, these ones are thought to have been built during Amenhotep III’s reign, and are believed to have been built elsewhere and then moved to the Avenue of the Sphinxes. Thirdly, we have the sphinx, which as we know is a lion’s body with a human head, and it’s these statues that there are the most of, we also know them to have been made during the time of Nectanebo I’s reign. So since he finished the Avenue off, it makes sense that there are more of them than the rest.

During the time of the pharaohs, we think that there would have been many more statues than can be seen now. We all know what the ravages of time will do to statues. So we actually only have 300 of the original ram statues left, the rest are believed to have been destroyed in the decades and centuries following the Pharaonic era of Ancient Egypt.

Opet Festival

It’s thought that the Path of God was used by the Ancient Egyptians once a year during the Opet Festival, where they would carry the statues of Gods in a parade down the road. We know this because there are texts from the 18th Dynasty of the New Kingdom that have survived for us to learn about it.

The Opet Festival was quite significant to the Ancient Egyptians, and it was held during the flooding season of the Nile, which symbolised crops and fertility and life and all that good stuff. And so too does the Festival.

The parade consisted of three divine boats that would be carried on shoulders as they walked down the road. These boats held statues of what is known as the Theban Triad, which are the supreme god Amun-Re, his consort Mut and their son Khonsu, you may be familiar with some of Khonsu’s more recent work in the tv show Moonknight.

So the three statues would be paraded down the Avenue of Sphinxes passing all the sphinx and ram statues. The journey from the Temple of Karnak to the Temple of Luxor was meant to be a symbolic recreation of Amun-Re and Mut’s marriage and the renewal of birth, so it all ties together.

We know that the Opet Festival was real because there are references to it all over the place. There are some inscriptions in the Temple of Khonsu which can be found among the Karnak Temples, as well as some scenes having been recorded by Queen Hatshepsut’s artists in the red cabin, also found among the Karnak Temples. If you’ve got a sharp eye you might also find some scenes of the festivities in the Ramesseum Temple in Edfu and the Temple of Medinet Habu. But the good stuff can be seen documented in the pillared hall of Luxor Temple, which of course was built by our mate Amenhotep III.

It’s thought that the festival would last for a standard 27 days, but it’s also thought that depending on the Pharaoh the festival could be several weeks long to just a couple of days, so clearly some external factors at play here.

As the centuries rolled past the sandy Egyptian desert decided to reclaim the Path of God and it wasn’t until relatively recently that the Avenue of the Sphinxes was rediscovered and reopened turning Luxor into an international tourist attraction, with a recreation of the Opet Festival parade. Which we’ll get to in a minute, but to peak your interest here’s a description of it all:

With bright yellow lights illuminating temples and fireworks lighting up the night sky, a similar procession was held, with ancient hymns playing in the background.

Excavation

It is unfortunate that over the span of history the road of such importance to the Ancient Egyptians was lost, almost completely destroyed. In fact the road was lost to such an extent that it was covered with copious amounts of sand and buried under housing.

But the last 50 or so years, have unveiled large portions of this exciting route. Such as the sphinxes that through some miracle still survive and what appears to be, surprisingly, a limestone roadbed. This was a path for Gods, so clearly it deserved only the best.

Back in 1949 was when the first eight sphinx statues were discovered. Quite luckily, they were found out the front of the Luxor Temple complex by Dr Zakaria Ghoneim, an Egyptian archaeologist.

For years, the excavations continued on and off, depending on the economic and political climate. And it hasn’t always been easy going, the team has had to demolish whole buildings, mosques, churches, homes, to uncover the route. It’s astonishing that these buildings that people lived and worked in were quite literally standing on top of this route of great significance to a people long gone.

Between 1984 and 1992, Mustafa Al-Saghir, who is now the director general of the Karnak Monuments, continued excavating portions of the Avenue, uncovering a total of 62 sphinxes.

More recently, in 2005, the Egyptian government has gotten a bit more involved, with the Luxor Governorate Strategy developed with the aim

to excavate, to restore, and to install a site-management program designed to integrate the Avenue of Sphinxes into Luxor City

The ultimate goal here is to develop the whole area of Luxor into a giant open-air museum, some may even claim the largest in the world.

So throughout the last sevenish decades, excavation and restoration of the site of the road has persisted despite being interrupted multiple times, mainly by political upheaval, such as the Arab Spring uprising that overthrew the country’s ruler in 2011, leading to civil unrest that lasted several years.

But in the lead up to the uprising, so from 2005 to 2011, the archaeologist Zahi Hawass was at the Luxor site giving it a good excavation. Of course work was forced to stop due to the uprising, but up until then they had made some pretty impressive progress.

The renovated road, as it stands today, has a sandstone pavement, with the sphinx and ram statues standing proudly on both sides. So far a total of 1057 statues have been unveiled along the road, so we’ve got 807 sphinx statues with the lion body and human head combination, and 250 statues with the ram head. And this isn’t even all of them, back in the ancient day, the statues that stand now would have made up just a third of what you would have seen back then.

Reopening

Even though work on the Avenue of the Sphinxes was forced to come to a stop, passion for this piece of history did not end with such a tiny speedbump as civil unrest. The end goal was to allow the everyday average historian the opportunity to wander straight down this road that had spent centuries buried under sand. And so that’s what they did, when they were able worked started up again and after almost 70 years of, intermittent, work, the restoration work was finally complete and able to be showcased to the world.

And so, a little more recently, in April 2021, an exceptionally elaborate procession was held. Called the Golden Parade, the Egyptian Government moved 22 ancient royal mummies across the capital to a new museum, using part of the Avenue of Sphinxes. And was it quite the show, make sure to check out some of the images of the procession.

Then Egypt decided that they wanted to revive the tradition of the Opet Festival, something that, most likely, hadn’t been seen in several thousand years.

And so in November of 2021, the Avenue of the Sphinxes was once again opened to the public, this time with a ridiculous amount of fanfare. The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities did such a great job with the mummy procession that they were encouraged to set about organising a grand ceremony to mark the official reopening of the Avenue of Sphinxes.

And what could be better than recreating what we know the ancient Opet Festival to be all about: music, dancing and light shows. And it seems to have been a massive hit with the locals and tourists who came just for the occasion. Here’s what Ahmed Hammam, a Luxor tour guide had to say about it all:

…I will be witnessing one of the greatest events that has ever happened in my lifetime…

And the festival certainly delivered. Starting after nightfall and spanning the length of the avenue with it’s now recognised statues, it all kicked off with a wonderful procession that included dressing up in pharaonic dress, a symphony orchestra, professional dancers, horse drawn carriages, lighting effects and even boats following along on the Nile.

Those in the know hoped that this display of an ancient festival all about fertility and the renewal of life would show the rest of the world that Egypt was ready to be seen as a place that, according to Egyptian archaeologist, Ali Abu Dashish

…preserve[s] and restore[s] antiquities.

And to be honest, I can’t think of a better way to promote Egypt’s archaeological discoveries in an attempt to revive its tourism industry after the ravages of a world-wide lockdown thanks to a pesky pandemic than bringing back the ancient Opet Festival. It certainly looked like a terrific success.

Today

These days the Avenue of the Sphinxes is another historical site that has been added to Luxor’s list of historical sites. And it’s in a pretty optimal position as well, Nile River Cruises regularly stop off at Luxor and its numerous famous ancient attractions, so it’s definitely something I recommend if you’re interested in heading on over to Egypt.

You can of course take a wander down the whole 3ish kilometres of the Avenue of Sphinxes, or wander over and visit the Karnak Temple complex and then head on down the Avenue to check out the Luxor Temple complex. And as you’re walking between the Temples don’t forget to look to the left and right to see the Sphinx statues that have survived centuries and the expansion of modernisation.

It's actually quite interesting that while the City of Luxor is one of the most valuable archaeological and tourist sites in the world, that it’s surrounds are being threatened by the uncontrollable urban sprawl.

So if you find yourself in the Egyptian area of the world, marvel at what we have managed to preserve and are still able to enjoy, like a simple road lined with Sphinx statues.