Egypt: the parade of the royal mummies. Parade of the Pharaohs – Magazine

Cairo, April 3, 2021 – A pharaonic-style event. They promised and they did. Also from the point of view of time: from the announced 40 minutes, with a direct game slightly delayed, the Golden Parade of the Pharaohs it lasted a long time, and ended after more than an hour. Seven and five minutes during which the streets of Cairo were transformed into the setting of a film about Ancient Egypt as the mummies of eighteen pharaohs and four queens passed by at dusk in chariots escorted by horse guards. An event with a bombastic name, the “Golden Parade of the Pharaohs”, with a blockbuster atmosphere, followed. official YouTube channel of the Ministry of Antiquities and Tourism It’s in Canale YouTube di Experience event by thousands of fans around the world despite the psychosis of the curse that had spread on social networks in recent days after a train accident in the center of the country with dozens of deaths, the collapse of a building in Cairo that killed 18 people and the incredible blockage of the Suez Canal due to Ever Given sedimentation. One disgrace after another that the most superstitious had linked to the transfer of the royal mummies from the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization, on the southeastern periphery of the Egyptian megalopolis.
And, instead, everything passed without incident, although with the limitations due to the coronavirus pandemic that minimized the presence of the public in the Nile. Not only that, despite the curse, today the last of the ships that are still in queue for the closure of the inland waterway crossed the Suez Canal. The mummies were found in Luxor on two different expeditions, in 1881 and 1898, and almost all of them date back to the time of the New Kingdom, from 1539 to 1075 BC. Among them are prominent figures of Egyptian civilization such as King Seqenenre, who started the liberation war against the Hyksos; Queen Hatshepsut, to whom the magnificent Deir Al-Bahari temple on the west bank of the Nile, opposite Luxor, is dedicated; Ramses II, the great pharaoh of the New Kingdom. Once at the National Museum, the royal mummies will be restored for about 15 days in the museum’s state-of-the-art laboratory: they will be prepared for installation within the new cabinets in the Royal Mummies Hall, decorated to resemble the Valley of the Kings, the area in southern Egypt that houses the original royal tombs. Before the arrival of the mummies, the wing, which will open to the public from April 18, was visited by Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al Sisi and UNESCO Director General Audrey Azoulay, accompanied by Tourism Minister Khaled Al Anani. “The parade made the Egyptians of their country proud,” said star archaeologist Zahi Hawass, a former Minister of Antiquities known as the Indiana Jones of Egypt. But the event, accompanied by 21 salutes of honor and fireworks, also aimed abroad, to attract to Egypt those millions of tourists who every year admire its beauties and that Covid has kept away for more than a year. For those who followed him live, it was better than a Romero movie: the dead returned in procession through the streets of Cairo. 22 mummies – 18 kings and four queens – were transported from the iconic Egyptian Museum, where most have continuously resided for over a century, to the new National Museum of Egyptian Civilization, a new resting place 5 kilometers away. In what has been called the golden parade of the pharaohs, the mummies traveled in an order of antiquity, the oldest first, each aboard a chariot decorated in an ancient style. And later Half-naked dancers, evocative music, hundreds of figures, fires. All are decidedly not archaeologically correct but certainly of great impact.

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