Bastet festival

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Bronze statuette of Bastet in the Louvre Museum in Paris .

The Bastet Festival (also called the Beautiful Festival of Drunkenness ) was held twice a year in ancient Egypt and is the “Great Bastet Festival” for the first time in the Old Kingdom as a New Year's celebration. The beginnings go back to the early dynastic time , when the goddess Bastet was also worshiped as a sachmet . There were also mythological connections to Hathor , which can be seen in the similarities of the festive rituals. Your originally Upper Egyptian cult moved over into the in the Nile Delta located Bubastis .

The “Great Bastet Festival”, which until the New Kingdom was closely related to the onset of the Nile flood , could later only begin after the arrival of the Nile flood due to the shifting heliacal rise of Sirius . The Egyptians later celebrated the "Little Bastet Festival" together with the Osiris New Year Festival , which is also known as the "Beautiful Festival of Drunkenness".

Fixed dates

The date of the Bastet festival has always been based on the Sothis lunar calendar , which in turn was linked to the Sothis cycle . The 1st Thoth in the Sothis lunar calendar signaled the new year. A beginning of the festival before the heliacal rise of Sirius was excluded, since only the Sothis lunar calendar days 1st to 29th Thoth came into question.

Due to the link to Sirius, the celebrations took place relatively constantly at the same time of year, since Sirius began at the end of the 5th millennium BC. Until the " Canopus Decree " moved slowly from June 3rd to July 14th and thus only a bandwidth from June 3rd to August 12th was given.

An extremely rare constellation was in 239 BC. In the 8th year of the reign of Ptolemy III. because both the Bastet festival and the heliacal rise of Sirius and the  “Beautiful Festival of the Desert Valley” fell on the same day. To consolidate this situation, Ptolemy III wrote. a year later his decree, which provided for the introduction of a leap day .

Fixed course

Herodotus (Historien, II 60) described the course of the festival in great detail. Since the flood of the Nile made the journey overland difficult, the way to Bubastis was covered by boat. During the journey, the travelers sang exuberantly and loudly. When passing through a town, dances were added and the residents were treated with diatribes. Women in particular were the focus of obscene sayings and clear erotic offers.

The alcohol consumption, mostly beer and wine, which had already begun upon arrival, increased upon arrival in Bubastis: “Where is the beer? My throat is dry as straw ”. The accounts of Herodotus are reflected in demotic compositions. The "Harfner-Lied" has achieved great fame:

“The harper speaks to the festival participants like this: 'I cannot sing hungry, I cannot hold the harp to sing if I am not satisfied with the wine'. He made the people pray that they should cry: 'Sing'. After he has been supplied with wine, the harpist begins to sing and everyone sees in the intoxication that the harp is upside down. And if he turns the harp in his hand, he sings about 'Frauenschand' (offensive behavior). "

- Excerpts from the "Harpner-Lied"

The course of the festival included all mythological behavior patterns of "the wild Sachmet", "the singing Bastet" and "the dancing Hathor".

literature

  • Hans Bonnet : Lexicon of the Egyptian religious history . Nikol, Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-937872-08-6 (former title: "Reallexikon der ägyptischen Religionsgeschichte."), Pp. 628–629.
  • Christian Hermann: Egyptian amulets from Palestine / Israel: With an outlook on their reception by the Old Testament , Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1994, ISBN 3-525-53773-5 .
  • Friedhelm Hoffmann : Egypt - culture and life in Greco-Roman times - a representation according to the demotic sources. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-05-003308-8 .
  • Rolf Krauss : Sothis and moon dates: studies on the astronomical and technical chronology of ancient Egypt. Gerstenberg, Hildesheim 1985, ISBN 3-8067-8086-X .
  • Richard-Anthony Parker : The calendars of ancient Egypt. Chicago Press, Chicago 1950.
  • Siegfried Schott : Ancient Egyptian festival dates. Publishing house of the Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz / Wiesbaden 1950.
  • MI Bakr, H. Brandl: Bubastis and the Temple of Bastet. In: MI Bakr, H. Brandl, F. Kalloniatis (Eds.): Egyptian Antiquities from Kufur Nigm and Bubastis. Opaion-Verlag, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-00-033509-9 , p. 31 (for the Bastet festival held in Bubastis as early as the 18th dynasty under Amenhotep III).
  • E. Bernhauer: Block Statue of Nefer-ka. In: MI Bakr, H. Brandl, F. Kalloniatis (Eds.): Egyptian Antiquities from Kufur Nigm and Bubastis. Opaion-Verlag, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-00-033509-9 , pp. 176-179 (inscribed evidence for the Bastet festival under Amenhotep III).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Friedhelm Hoffmann: Egypt - culture and lifeworld in Greco-Roman times - a representation based on the demotic sources. Berlin 2000, p. 223.
  2. ↑ Christian Hermann: Egyptian amulets from Palestine / Israel: With a view of their reception by the Old Testament. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1994, pp. 145-147.
  3. ↑ Rolf Krauss: Sothis and moon data: Studies on the astronomical and technical chronology of ancient Egypt. Gerstenberg, Hildesheim 1985, pp. 15-17.
  4. ↑ Friedhelm Hoffmann: Egypt - culture and lifeworld in Greco-Roman times - a representation based on the demotic sources. Berlin 2000, p. 225.