Sed festival

For other uses, see SED (disambiguation).
Alabaster sculpture of an Old Kingdom pharaoh, Pepi I Meryre, dressed to celebrate his Heb Sed, c. 2362 BCE, Brooklyn Museum

The Sed festival (ḥb-sd, conventional pronunciation /sɛd/; also known as Heb Sed or Feast of the Tail) was an ancient Egyptian ceremony that celebrated the continued rule of a pharaoh. The name is taken from the name of an Egyptian wolf god, one of whose names was Wepwawet or Sed.[1] The less-formal feast name, the Feast of the Tail, is derived from the name of the animal's tail that typically was attached to the back of the pharaoh's garment in the early periods of Egyptian history. This tail might have been the vestige of a previous ceremonial robe made out of a complete animal skin.[2]

The ancient festival might, perhaps, have been instituted to replace a ritual of murdering a pharaoh who was unable to continue to rule effectively because of age or condition.[3][4] Eventually, Sed festivals were jubilees celebrated after a ruler had held the throne for thirty years and then every three to four years after that. The festival, primarily, served to reassert pharaonic authority and state ideology. Sed festivals implied elaborate temple rituals and included processions, offerings, and such acts of religious devotion as the ceremonial raising of a djed, the base or sacrum of a bovine spine, a phallic symbol representing the strength, "potency and duration of the pharaoh's rule".[5] The festival also involved symbolic reaffirmation of the pharaoh's rulership over Upper and Lower Egypt.[6] Pharaohs who followed the typical tradition, but did not reign so long as 30 years had to be content with promises of "millions of jubilees" in the afterlife.[7]

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 the relief cycles of the Twenty-second Dynasty king Osorkon II... at Bubastis."[8]

  1. ^ Shaw, Ian. Exploring Ancient Egypt. Oxford University Press. 2003. ISBN 0-19-511678-X. p. 53
  2. ^ Kamil, Jill (1996). The Ancient Egyptians: Life in the Old Kingdom. American Univ in Cairo Press. p. 47. ISBN 978-977-424-392-9.
  3. ^ Cottrell, Leonard. The Lost Pharaohs. Evans, 1950. p. 71.
  4. ^ Nock, Arthur Darby; Wainwright, G. A. (1940). "The Sky-Religion in Egypt, Its Antiquity and Effects". The Classical Weekly. 34 (5): 51. doi:10.2307/4341020. ISSN 1940-641X. JSTOR 4341020.
  5. ^ Quoted from: Applegate, Melissa Littlefield. The Egyptian Book of Life: Symbolism of Ancient Egyptian Temple and Tomb Art. HCI, 2001. p. 173.
  6. ^ Van de Mieroop, Marc (2011). A History of Ancient Egypt. WileyBlackwell. ISBN 978-1-119-62089-1. OCLC 1201693532.
  7. ^ William Murnane, "The Sed Festival: A Problem in Historical Method", MDAIK 37, pp. 369–76.
  8. ^ David O'Connor & Eric Cline, Amenhotep: Perspectives on his Reign, University of Michigan, 1998, p. 16.