Talk:Coronation of the pharaoh

Title and scope of the article
I'm glad to see this article has been created; I've long thought that there should be an article on this subject. I'm not sure that this title is ideal, though. "Feast" (unlike the related German word, fest) means a large or celebratory meal rather than a festival. The coronation ceremony did include a feast, but that wasn't the whole of the ceremony. In English Egyptological sources, the ceremony is usually just called the coronation. I think better titles would be coronation (ancient Egypt) or maybe coronation of the pharaoh (which would match the article titles for European ceremonies, like coronation of the British monarch).

I'm also not sure about the inclusion of the Sed festival in the list of ceremonies in the coronation. In the sources I'm familiar with (including a fairly detailed one I recently obtained, The Pharaoh by Garry J. Shaw) the Sed festival is treated as a separate ceremony from the coronation. The two celebrations have several rituals in common—crowning in the shrines of Upper and Lower Egypt, releasing birds and shooting arrows in the four directions, etc. But my sources only refer to the ceremony that was celebrated periodically during a reign as the Sed festival; they don't say that the Sed was also incorporated into the coronation. Based on them, I'd say this article should list those rituals and point out that they were shared by the Sed festival, but that the Sed itself shouldn't be treated as a component of the coronation. Of course, the sources in this article may well say something different. A. Parrot (talk) 04:09, 20 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Hi. Actually, some sources say that the coronation of the pharaoh included some kind of "minor sed festival", in which several provincial deities and the great state deities "greeted" the new king and "drew" a "symbolic contract between earth and heaven" with the king. The following sed feasts were a symbolic renewing of that contract and at the same time the rejuvenation of the king's power, youth and vitality. Regards;--Nephiliskos (talk) 13:50, 20 January 2013 (UTC)