Sed festival

The Sed festival (also known as Heb Sed or Feast of the Tail) was an ancient Egyptian ceremony which was held to celebrate the continued rule of a pharaoh. The name derives from the name of an Egyptian wolf god, one of whose names was Wepwawet or Sed.

The less formal feast name, the Feast of the Tail, is derived from the name of the animal's tail that typically was attached to the back of the pharaoh's garment in the early periods of Egyptian history. This suggests that the tail was the vestige of a previous ceremonial robe made out of a complete animal skin.Kamil, Jill. The Ancient Egyptians: Life in the Old Kingdom. American University in Cairo, 1996. ISBN 9774243927. Page 47.

Despite the antiquity of the Sed Festival and the hundreds of references to it throughout the history of Ancient Egypt, the most detailed records of the ceremonies—apart from the reign of Amenhotep III—come mostly from "relief cycles of the Fifth Dynasty king Neuserra... in his sun temple at Abu Ghurab, of Akhenaten at East Karnak, and of the Twenty-second Dynasty king Osorkon II... at Bubastis."

The ancient festival probably was instituted to replace a ritual of murdering a pharaoh who had...
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