VIDEO: Egypt unveils Pharaonic 'Rams Road' at Karnak Temple
A general view of the official ceremony opening the ‘Rams Road’ in Luxor. AFP
For the first time in nearly 3,500 years, the Road of Rams, which includes more than a thousand statues in the form of a lion's body and a ram's head, returned to light, linking the Karnak Temple with the Luxor Temple in southern Egypt.
During a solemn celebration in Luxor, the Rams Road was opened after its restoration, in the presence of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi.
At the beginning of the celebration, Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Khaled El-Anany said that the road "includes 1,057 statues."
The Ministry of Tourism asserts that the Rams Road will make Luxor an “open museum” in a country whose tourism sector employs two million people, and generates more than 10% of the gross national product.
The length of the rams road is 2.7 km.
King Nectanebo I, founder of the 30th Pharaonic Dynasty, (380-362 BC), built the road in its final form, where he placed the sphinxes with rams’ heads with a memorial inscription saying, “I created a beautiful road for Abu Amun-Ra, an ancient Sun god, surrounded by walls and decorated with flowers, for him to sail to the Luxor temple."
The features of the road and its first statues were revealed in 1949, then excavations stopped until they resumed at the beginning of the second millennium, then stopped again after 2011, then work resumed again as of 2017, according to what Anany said during the opening ceremony.
The complex of Karnak and Luxor temples, in addition to the pharaonic tombs in the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens, all registered within the UNESCO World Heritage.
The pharaonic antiquities are one of Egypt's most important tourist treasures, and they are a source of national pride in a country that boasts a civilization that spans thousands of years.
In April, the world's televisions broadcast a large celebration held on the occasion of the "mummy procession," during which the mummies of kings and queens from the Pharaonic era were transferred from the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir to the new Museum of Egyptian Civilization.
In the coming months, Egypt intends to open another new museum, the Grand Egyptian Museum, which is being built at the foot of the pyramids. It will be an alternative to the current Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square, which no longer has the capacity to display hundreds of pieces in the stores of the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities in Tahrir.
