Egypt lavishly inaugurates the restoration of the Alley of the Sphinxes in Luxor

The 3,500-year-old hundreds of ram-headed, lion-bodied sphinxes of Luxor have found a new lease of life on the path leading to the temple of Karnak in southern Egypt.

On November 25 in the evening, during a grandiose ceremony which Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi's Egypt is fond of, the president inaugurated the alley of renovated statues which leads to the temple of the god Amun, one of the main deities of the Egyptian pantheon.

Read alsoAncient Egypt temple side, our guide to Luxor

The objective, assures the Ministry of Tourism, is to make places "

" in a country where the tourism sector employs two million Egyptians and generates more than 10% of the GDP.

Karnak, a vast complex north of Thebes, Luxor today, its temples and palaces, as well as the necropolises of the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens are listed as World Heritage by Unesco.

See also "The largest ancient city" of Egypt discovered near Luxor

Each year, millions of tourists flock to the sites of ancient Egypt, including this alley of ram-headed sphinxes, which runs for three kilometers, from the temple of Karnak to that of ancient Thebes, the capital of Egypt. in the Middle and New Kingdom and city of the god Amun.

The hundreds of statues of mythological animals of Luxor, discovered in 1949, had been at the heart of a controversy in mid-2020 because four of the ram-headed sphinxes had been separated from their congeners to be installed on the iconic Tahrir Square of Cairo, the heart of the 2011 revolution which resulted in the fall of the autocrat Hosni Mubarak. Already, one of the two obelisks of the Luxor temple had been moved in 1836. It is he who overlooks from the Place de la Concorde in Paris.

Egyptology is a precious business for Cairo which regularly uses its antiques to shine worldwide.

In April 2021, televisions around the world broadcast the images of a grandiose procession in Cairo.

Twenty-two black chariots adorned with golden and luminous patterns reminiscent of ancient burial vessels had transported the mummies of kings and queens of ancient Egypt to the new National Museum of Egyptian Civilization (NMEC).

Cairo has long announced a grand opening in the coming months of the new Grand Egyptian Museum, at the foot of the pyramids of Giza.

Luxor's new treasures