Sed festival

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The sed festival (also known as Heb Sed or Feast of the Tail) was an ancient Egyptian ceremony which was held to celebrate the continued rule of a pharaoh. It is supposed that the name refers to an animal's tail that was normally attached to the back of the pharaoh's garment in the early periods of Egyptian history.^[1] Despite the antiquity of the Sed Festival and the hundreds of references to it throughout the history of Ancient Egypt, the most detailed records of the ceremonies - apart from the reign of Amenhotep III - come mostly from "relief cycles of the Fifth Dynasty king Neuserra... in his sun temple at Abu Ghurab, of Akhenaten at East Karnak, and of the Twenty-second Dynasty king Osorkon II... at Bubastis."^[2]

Sed festivals were jubilees celebrated after a ruler had held the throne for thirty years and then every three (or four in one case) years after that. They were primarily held to rejuvenate the king's strength and stamina while he was still sitting on the throne. The ancient festival was probably instituted to replace the ritual murder of a king "when he had reached an age at which he was judged to be too old to rule".^[3] There is clear evidence for early kings celebrating the Heb Sed, such as Den and Djoser. Within his pyramid complex, there are two boundary stones in his Heb Sed court, in the Pyramid of Djoser. He is also shown performing the Heb Sed in a false doorway inside his pyramid.

Sed Festivals implied elaborate temple rituals and included processions, offerings and such acts of religious devotion as the ceremonial raising of a djed, a phallic symbol representing the "potency and duration of the pharaoh's rule".^[4] One of the earliest Sed festivals for which we have evidence is that of Pepi I in the South Saqqara Stone Annal document and the most lavish, judging by surviving inscriptions, were those of Ramesses II and Amenhotep III. Sed Festivals were still celebrated by the later Libyan era kings such as Shoshenq III, Shoshenq V, Osorkon I, who had his second Heb Sed in his year 33, and Osorkon II who constructed a massive temple at Bubastis complete with a red granite gateway decorated with scenes of this jubilee to commemorate his own Heb Sed.

Several pharaohs violated the traditional 30 year rule particularly in the case of Akhenaten and Hatshepsut who celebrated her jubilee in her 16th regnal year at Thebes. Some Egyptologists, such as Von Beckerath, in his book Chronology of the Egyptian Pharaohs, speculate that Hatshepsut may have done so to mark the passing of 30 years from the death of her father, Thutmose I, from whom she derived all of her legitimacy to rule Egypt. Other pharaohs who honoured this rule and did not reign as long as 30 years had to be content with promises of "millions of jubilees" in the afterlife.^[5]

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