Heb-Sed Festival

heb sed

Definition

The Heb-Sed (Egyptian Hb-sd, also called the Sed festival or royal jubilee) is the Egyptian renewal festival a reigning pharaoh celebrated — traditionally after 30 years on the throne, and, when held, every three years after that. It renews kingship itself, a symbolic death-and-rebirth of royal vigour, rather than being a calendar feast or a cycle tied to the sky. Belmonte and Lull note, though, that by extension one lunar day — the 28th day of the lunation, LD28 — carries the metaphoric name Hb-sd nwt, "Jubilee of Nut."

In Tradition

In the work of Spalinger on royal calendars, and as set out in standard reference works such as Wilkinson and Redford's Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt (2001), the Heb-Sed renews the royal vigour that justifies a pharaoh's rule. The 30-year mark is an ideal; in practice the festivals are recorded at varying intervals, depending on the politics of each reign.

In Practice

From the Early Dynastic period through the Ptolemaic era, Egyptian pharaohs recorded their Heb-Sed celebrations in temple reliefs, on monuments, in dedicatory inscriptions, and on commemorative scarabs. The festival was a sequence of ritual acts: the king ran a ceremonial course, received the Red and White Crowns of the Two Lands, and was acknowledged by statues of gods brought from across Egypt. Reliefs of the Heb-Sed survive especially well at the temple of Niuserre at Abu Gurob (Dynasty 5) and in the Karnak temple complex (Dynasty 18-19). Belmonte and Lull use Heb-Sed commemorations — wine dockets and scarabs — as one of the anchors for reconstructing how long New Kingdom pharaohs reigned, in their study of the chronology gap between Thutmose III and Amenhotep III.

Historical Origin

The earliest depictions of the Heb-Sed ritual are on the Narmer Macehead (Early Dynastic, about 3100 BCE) and on Den's ivory label (Dynasty 1). It is treated in Belmonte and Lull, In Search of Cosmic Order (the chronology chapter, which uses Hb-sd commemorations), and discussed in Spalinger's studies of the Egyptian calendar (1990s-2000s).

Definition

In Tradition

In Practice

Historical Origin

Further Reading