The cultural and historical roots of the <i>sd</i> festival in ancient Egypt

In ancient Egypt, the royal festival sd was celebrated a few years after the coronation and was involved in important events during the reign of the monarch. The earliest material sources about celebrations relate to the Nagada culture (IV millennium BC) and the Early Kingdom. They show the scene of the ritual running of the leader/king after the sacred bull − the god Apis. Comparative and iconographic research methods are used. At the same time, the bull was sacrificed. The origins of the ritual of sacrifice go back to the primitive times of hunting life. A collective meal with a slaughtered animal meant communion with the ancestral ancestor. Totemic beliefs have been transformed in the dynamics of the historical process. The sacrifice of the bull was a central ritual during royal holidays, including the sd festival. The purpose of this ritual was to release the spirit of the victim, who was considered as the god. As for the donor, the king confirmed his religious and social status. But in the process of holding the festival, the king himself became a victim. Considering this celebration as a transitional rite, which includes three stages: separation, intermediate and inclusion, allows us to see in it a magico-religious procedure, the experience of symbolic death in the previous state and rebirth in a new capacity. The king confirmed his rights to the Egyptian throne and, as a guarantor of the prosperity of society at the highest level of religious beliefs, restored the victory of cosmic order over chaos. The iconography of the pharaoh with a bull's tail during the ritual running during the celebration of Hb-sd has been preserved throughout the history of ancient Egypt. The spelling of the phonetic part of the word tail and this festival are identical. This supports the hypothesis that religious and mythological ideas about the king's involvement in the sacred bull with mana projected onto the ruler of Egypt have been preserved for thousands of years. Universal ideas about the sacrifice of the bull and its dismemberment were associated with myths and rituals about the first sacrifice, about dead and resurrected gods, including the Egyptian Osiris, and the bull Apis was considered as his companion, the animal form of the god.