The Opet Festival in Ancient Egypt

Of all the early river valley civilizations— Mesopotamia along the Tigris-Euphrates Rivers, Yangshao along the Yellow River in China, Harappan along the Indus River in India/Pakistan, and Egypt along the Nile—it was only the people on the Nile who coalesced into the world’s first nation around 3150 BCE. Egypt remained one of the strongest ancient civilizations for over 3000 years, by far surpassing anything before or since. During that time, art and writing evolved with unprecedented consistency. Thanks to this consistency, extensive archaeological records have made it easy to interpret and reconstruct Egyptian celebration.

Their celebrations centered almost completely on a complex, polytheistic religion. The most prominent and enduring event was an annual spectacle called the Opet Festival in Thebes (present day Luxor), located in Upper Egypt. As with their other contemporary civilizations such as Sumer, the reasons for the festival were distinctly religious ones of rejuvenation and rebirth. Also like the other civilizations, the primary component of the event was a procession.

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Location of Luxor in Upper Egypt

The festival began with offerings made by the Pharaoh to the god Amun-Re in the god's temple in Thebes, today's Karnak Temple. These offerings supposedly rejuvenated the Pharoah's divine power, although the exact nature of the rituals is unknown and this rejuvenation may also have taken place in the Luxor Temple. From the Karnak Temple complex, the Pharaoh and his queen led a procession of the god in his statue form plus the other gods of Thebes, Mut the Mother Goddess, and Khonsu, their offspring. All the statues were borne aloft on small barques carried on the shoulders of temple priests who made their way to the temple dock and small harbour just off the Nile. The statues were loaded onto larger, highly decorated river barges which were hauled by labourers or specially chosen people out the waterway to the Nile where they were towed upriver to the Luxor Temple. Here they were offloaded and a short procession took them into the temple where the second part of the cermony took place, the symbolic divine marriage of Amun-Re to Mut, which was in essence a fertility rite related to the rising waters of the Nile that re-fertilized the valley every year in the spring.

About three weeks later the entire process was reversed and the god's statues returned to the Karnak Temple, this time via a processional land route lined with sphinxes. Throughout the long history of the festival - at least well into the reign of Ramesses III, probably longer -  the routes changed occasionally, depending no doubt on the weather and/or the whims of the powerful temple priests and Pharaoh.

What made these processions fascinating was their magnitude. They also incorporated musicians, acrobats, dancers, the army, charioteers, sacrificial animals - probably thousands of participants in all. The festival itself accommodated at least 80,000 or so onlookers (the approximate population of Thebes in the New Kingdom period) and incorporated a great deal of sacrificial feasting. The statues of the gods, although relatively small, are thought to have been constructed of gold. The Nile barges used for the water processions must have also been spectacular, especially the barge for the god Amun-Re, which has been partly described in a written account of the time. “The gold shrine on deck is inlaid with every costly stone, like a palace; and notice the rams’ heads of gold from front to rear, fitted with uraeus-serpents wearing atef-crowns."

Entrance to Karnak Temple Today

Opet Procession Leaving Karnak Temple in Time of Ramsses II

(Image courtesy of Serena Zhang, http://xiuyuan.deviantart.com/gallery/)

One can get a good idea of the immensity of the festival by visiting the temples of Karnak and Luxor that are still standing today in the city of Luxor. The Karnak temple and surrounding grounds was and still is, the largest religious complex in the world. It was built with the Opet Festival in mind in various stages beginning in the 18th Dynasty period, around 1500 BCE. The Luxor temple was constructed starting about the same time. It is from scenes carved into the walls of part of this temple known as the colonnade by none other than King Tutankhamun, that we know so much about the Opet Festival.

Part of immense Hypostyle Hall in Karnak Temple through which the Opet Procession would have travelled

Entrance to colonnade in Luxor Temple

Carved scene of dancer/acrobats participating in Opet Festival, taken from walls of colonnade in Luxor Temple

Portable barque shrine similar to one that would have housed Amun-Re's statue and that would have been carried on the shoulders of priests in the Opet Procession

References:

• Bell, L. (1997). The New Kingdom “Divine” Temple: The Example of Luxor. In B.E. Shafer (Ed.), Temples of Ancient Egypt. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• Doyle, N. (1998). Iconography and the Interpretation of Ancient Egyptian Watercraft. Unpublished Master of Arts thesis. Texas A&M University.
• Ellis, N. (1999). Feasts of Light: Celebrations for the Seasons of Life Based on the Egyptian Goddess Mysteries. Quest Books.
• Epigraphic Survey. (1994). Reliefs and Inscriptions at Luxor Temple, Vol. 1: The Festival Procession of Opet in the Colonnade Hall, OIP 112. Chicago: The Oriental Institute.
• Kitchen, K.A. (1982). Pharaoh Triumphant: The Life and Times of Ramesses II. Cairo: Cairo University Press.
• Lauffray, J. (1979). Karnak d’Egypte: Domain du divin. Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.
• Wilkinson, R.H. (2000). The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press.

Processions in Ancient Times

What we enjoy today as parades had their roots in the processions of ancient peoples thousands of years ago.

The processional form of celebration has been around for a long time. The oldest images of what seem to be processions have been found from as early as 5500 BCE in the rock shelters of Bhimbetka in central India, and others even older may very well surface in the future. Moving ahead to 3200 – 3000 BCE, a priceless artifact, the Warka or Uruk Vase from Sumer depicts a procession of animals and food dedicated to the goddess Inanna.

Uruk Vase (Courtesy http://www.ancientworlds.net/aworlds_media/ibase_1/00/09/61/00096158_000.jpg)

Likewise, around the same time in Egypt, 3150 BCE, the famous Narmer palette has what appears to be a small victory procession on one side.

Narmer Palette showing procession in upper register

Another priceless artifact, the Standard of Ur, dating from around 2600-2400 BCE, depicts the Sumerian army in what appears to be a triumphal procession on one side and on the other, a procession of food and other goods to a banquet.

Standard of Ur - Banquet procession side (Courtesy http://www.britishmuseum.org/)

Later still, during the zenith of the Minoan civilization beginning around 1700 BCE, palaces were constructed with specific processional pathways, supposedly for rituals associated with their Mother Goddess.

Processional Way in Knossos Palace of the Minoan Civilization in Crete

It is reasonable to surmise that Sumer, the Minoans, and the Egyptians influenced each other during these periods because of similarities in artistic styles, and thus the processional form of celebration probably evolved from these contacts as well.

But why a procession? What is it about this form of celebration that has made it so popular through the ages? Well, first of all, without modern technology it would have been by far the most efficient way to convey a message to the largest number of people. A processional route, particularly if it was the streets of a city, could accommodate literally thousands of spectators, just as it does today. If a king wanted to celebrate a victory, what better way than a procession.

Second, a procession transformed its route into a sacred space. The physical boundaries and entrances and exits were the sides of the city streets themselves. During the procession, these areas were treated differently - and usually more reverently - than they were under normal circumstances. Again, there is no difference today.

Third, processions were, and continue to be, versatile forms of celebration. Their constantly changing nature could allow them to grow or diminish in size according to the need. They could also be used to begin or end an event, to highlight some component of an event, or in many cases in the ancient world, to be the main event itself.

I'll be looking more closely at some of these in future posts.

References:

• Du Toit, H. (2009). Pageants and Processions: Images and Idiom as Spectacle. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
• Logiadou-Platonos, S. (Date unknown). Knossos: The Palace of Minos a Survey of the Minoan Civilization. Athens: I. Mathioulakis.

Symbolic Thinking and Celebration

I have broken down celebrations - or as those of us who have been involved with the practical end of them, special events - into occasions that "honour, discuss, sell, teach about, encourage, observe, or influence human endeavors." However, to be able to take any meaning from such events, it is a logical conclusion that the human beings involved must understand what the celebration is about. In simple terms, that means that they must understand symbolism and at the very least, simple ritual. In prehistoric times, as now, this trait would be a prerequisite to even having a celebration.

The big question is, "When did this trait and the associated one of innovation, first appear in human behaviour?" To most scientists today, their appearance is interpreted to be the point at which our species utilized a combination of language and the ability to think abstractly or symbolically. This point in time has been termed the “Great Leap Forward” by Diamond and others. A major find such as the symbolic python in the Rhino Cave has now added fuel to the ongoing debate about where and when this point in time occurred, because it has placed such a combination in Africa at the time of the Middle Paleolithic period, 70,000 years ago. This drastically alters previous collective wisdom that placed culturally modern practices in Europe about 30,000 to 40,000 years ago. I have also today tweeted about another find in the Sibudu Cave in South Africa that places such a date in and around 64,000 years ago.

The debate actually began seriously heating up around the beginning of the 21^st century with the discovery of snail-shell beads, polished stone tools, and patterned red ochre in the Blombos Cave area of South Africa, dating from about the same period, 75,000 years ago. As well, finds of similar objects have been teased from the soil of various digs to tantalize researchers: a 300,000-to-500,000-year-old figurine from Morocco; three 400,000-year-old wooden throwing spears from Schoningen in Germany; a 300,000-year-old stone hand axe in a pit of Homo heidelbergensis bones in Atapuerca, Spain; a 233,000-year-old putative figurine from Berekhat Ram in Israel; two 100,000-year-old fragments of notched bone from South Africa’s Klasies River Mouth Cave; a 60,000-year-old piece of flint incised with concentric arcs from Quneitra in Israel; and a polished plate of mammoth tooth from Tata in Hungary, dated to between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. These objects represent the ability of the makers to innovatively transfer meaning to something external. More simply, they represent symbolic thought. Any or all of them may very well eventually lead to different conclusions about the exact location of our cultural genesis.

On the other hand, some scientists tend to believe that the production of obvious art represents the beginning of modern culture. Many of the oldest art objects have indeed been found in Europe. Among these is a number of small, carved animal figures and a carved ivory flute, all dating back to between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago, discovered in southwestern Germany. The famous cave paintings in France, discussed in my last post, and lesser-known paintings in India and Africa do not show up until slightly later.

Part of the Chauvet Cave Paintings

Current thinking does, however, seem to be narrowing down to a consensus that the development of symbolic thought was a longer evolutionary process than at first believed.

References:

• Bednarik, R.G. (2003). The Earliest Known Palaeoart. In Bobrov, V.V. (Ed.), Pervobytnaya arkheologiya: chelovek i iskusstvo, Kemerovskii gosudarstvennyi universitet. Novosibirsk. pp. 23-31.
• Curry, A. (2007). The Dawn of Art: A controversial scholar claims modern culture was born in the foothills of the Alps. Archaeology September/October 2007. pp. 28-33.
• Diamond, J. (1999). Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 39.
• Edgar, B. (2008). Home of the Modern Mind: Did culture begin with the color red and a Stone Age clambake? Archaeology March/April 2008.
• Matthews, D. (2008). Special Event Production: The Process. Oxford: Elsevier.
• The first Europeans – one million years ago. Science and Nature: Prehistoric Life. Retrieved August 14, 2008, from http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/prehistoric_life/human/human_evolution/first_europeans1.shtml.
• Wong, K. (2006). The Morning of the Modern Mind. Scientific American: Becoming Human: Evolution and the Rise of Intelligence, Vol.16, No.2. pp. 74-83.