Egypt.. Rams' Road turns Luxor into an "open museum"
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, has returned to light, linking the Karnak Temple with the Luxor Temple in southern Egypt.
During a solemn celebration in Luxor, 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 Al-Anani 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 ram's heads with a memorial inscription saying, "I created a beautiful road for Abu Amun Ra surrounded by walls and decorated with flowers to sail it to Luxor Temple."
The features of the road and its first statues were revealed in 1949, then the excavation work stopped until it resumed at the beginning of the second millennium and then stopped again after the “revolution” of 2011 that toppled Hosni Mubarak, then work resumed again from 2017, again during the last two decades, according to What Anani 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, are all registered among the UNESCO World Heritage.
And there was widespread controversy in Egypt in the middle of the year 2020, when four of the ram-headed Sphinxes that were extracted from their brothers in Luxor were moved to be placed in Cairo's Tahrir Square, the square that was the heart of the "revolution" that toppled Hosni Mubarak in 2011.
The pharaonic antiquities are one of Egypt's most important tourist wealth and a source of national pride in a country that boasts of its civilization spanning 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 and 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.
Follow our latest local and sports news and the latest political and economic developments via Google news