Abstract
IT has long been known that the avenue of ram-headed sphinxes Amenophis III which extends southwarcte from the Temple of Khons at Karnak is the nonthern end of a processional way once linking the Temple of Karnak with the Temple of Luxor about one and a half miles to the south. On the line of this avenue, Zakaria Effendi Ghoneim, chief inspector of antiquities for Upper Egypt, has recently found a further series of human-headed sphinxes erected by either Nectanebo I or II about a thousand years later, in the late fourth century B.C. The main interest of the new discovery appears to lie, for the moment at least, in the inscriptions on the base of each sphinx. "The text records that Nectanebo had made this road for Amun so that he might make good navigation from Luxor". The god Amun was normally resident at Karnak. The principal occasion on which he visited Luxor was during the annual festival of Opet, when he was conveyed by river from Karnak to Luxor and the whole city was given over to festivity for many days. The new texts, therefore, either hint that by the end of the Pharaonic period the river journey of Amun during the Feast of Opet had been replaced by a progress by land, or they refer to a new or unidentified Theban feast. As the clearance and excavations round the Temple of Luxor progress, there is every reason to expect that new discoveries will be made, and that fresh light will be thrown on the early history of Thebes.
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Avenue of Human-headed Sphinxes at Luxor. Nature 163, 630 (1949). https://doi.org/10.1038/163630c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/163630c0