The Thoth Review and World Report
Egyptian Harvest Festival by Hilarity Hatshepsut
This is the time of year when American’s celebrate Thanksgiving, when friends and family gather around a table full of traditional food and give thanks for the blessings of the year. In most households, parades are watched on television in the morning and, in the afternoon and evening, sporting events are being watched on most TVs.
But, Americans did not corner the market on Thanksgiving. Harvest celebrations and rituals are nearly as old as mankind. And the ancient Egyptians are no exception, although they didn’t celebrate their harvest in the fall. In Egypt, they celebrated their harvest in the spring, late March-early April. There were many gods and goddesses associated with the harvest, such as Heget, goddess of childbirth and closely associated with grain germination; Renenutet, goddess of grain and fertility; Isis, reviver of the grain; and Osiris, the god of vegetation. The most notable harvest festival was dedicated to the fertility god, Min.
The Egyptians celebrated the harvest much like we do today but with an ancient flair. Their celebrations began with a sacred processional in which statues of the gods where carried down the streets with great pomp and circumstance, sacred hymns were sung and ritual dances performed. After the parades, there would be feasting accompanied by music and song, and yes, on many occasions there were even sporting events.
When it came time to harvest the crops, the ancient farmer, believing that spirits that made the crops grow and would be released or killed when the crops were harvested, pretended to cry to appease the spirits.
After countless millennia spanning many people and times, harvest festivals are still held: while there are a few traditions forever lost to us, and some new ones added, for the most part, not much has changed at all.
Happy Harvest Everyone!
Group News
The Pyramid Club
Ever wish you had a time machine so you could travel from your ancient per into the distant future? Well, now you can! Just visit The Pyramid Club and you will find yourself in the early twentieth century, an era that had people scrambling with wanderlust to rediscover the ancient ruins scattered throughout the desert sands of Egypt.
The Pyramid Club is home to the Hotel Cairo, a full service hotel that offers amenities such as a library that is open twenty four hours where guests may conduct research and exchange knowledge; there is a restaurant and bar, and even a lovely little gift shop!
This is a charming, active role play group with eclectic and diverse characters: it takes you back to an exciting time in history when people were passionate to learn more about our past, and lived for grand adventures.
Currently, the Pyramid Club is working on a new storyline that will take adventurers on a dig in The Valley Of The Kings, if this interests you,
visit this fun group and if you join, make sure you stop by the Office of Antiquities and apply for your dig permit!
Happy Hunting!
Mummies In The Cellar by Hilarity Hatshepsut
Cairo- Recently Egyptian archaeologists have been searching for treasure but not in the sands of the desert, instead they are searching for antiquities in the dark, dusty basement of the Egyptian Museum where for the last one hundred years precious artifacts have been stored and forgotten until now.
Prompted by the recent theft of three statues by members of the clean up crew, official’s are now diligently working to catalogue and organize well over one hundred thousand priceless artifacts that are stored in dusty crates, some piled floor to ceiling among cobwebs and damp conditions. Many of them have never been catalogued.
Dr. Zahi Hawass, the general secretary of The Supreme Council Of Antiquities declared, “The basement is like an antiquities graveyard.” and Dr. Ali Radwan, a professor of Egyptology at Cairo University called it “an accumulation of 100 years of neglect.”
Just last year Dr.Hawass decided a precise inventory needed to be done and sent in a team of curator’s who have discovered 22,000 artifacts, which comprises about 20 percent of the antiquities in the dank cellar. So far 600 coffins and 170 mummies have been found, along with other artifacts. There are many artifacts that the Egyptian museum had no idea were housed within its walls, such as parts of the palace of Pharaoh Marenptah (1307 B.C. to 1196 B.C)
Dr. Hawass is dedicated to having the inventory completed within a year; there will be proper storage shelves and air conditioning. But for now, the cellar is in complete disarray. Dusty crates are scattered about, human remains lay openly on shelves, tablets, jars, hieroglyphs are scattered about in the basement. The disorganization is so bad that one never knows what they will find until they happen upon it, in one area a half dozen coffins were found strewn about with tops and bottoms mixed up and covered in layers of filth, when cleaned the intricately painted coffins were revealed to belong to the priests of Amon who were laid to rest nearly 3,000 years ago.
Dr. Radwan hopes the rescued treasures are never again victim to such neglect. “Maybe the latest theft was an alarm,” he said, “a wake up call for us to fix the situation.”
You can read the full article at
New York Times
