People today ring in the new year with parties, fireworks and Champagne toasts, but the ancient Egyptians also celebrated the new year and even had festivities by the Pyramids of Giza.
While some of their traditions were similar to ours, others were different. So how did the ancient Egyptians celebrate the new year? And how was it different from our celebrations today?
The New Year’s festival — known as Wepet Renpet, or “the opening of the year” — actually involved a few traditions that are still practiced today, such as giving presents to friends and family that offered New Year’s greetings. But some customs were unique to their culture. For instance, the ancient Egyptians would bring images of deities out of temples so they could be regenerated by the sunlight, according to their beliefs.
Wepet Renpet had another key distinction: Its date changed over time, and sometimes, it was celebrated multiple times a year. One interesting record notes that, for a time, the Egyptians celebrated three of these festivals in a single year.
Related: Ancient New Year’s scene from Egypt uncovered on roof of 2,200-year-old temple
The ancient Egyptians had a migrating new year
The Egyptian calendar had 365 days in a year, but it did not have a leap year. The lack of a leap year meant that, over time, Wepet Renpet “wandered across the climatic seasons,” Juan Antonio Belmonte, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands who has written extensively about the calendar system of ancient Egypt, told Live Science in an email.
When the Egyptian calendar was created around 4,800 years ago, Wepet Renpet was close to the summer solstice (which occurs around June 21), Belmonte said. This is close to the time when the annual flooding of the Nile occurred in Egypt. The annual flooding irrigated the adjacent farmland, allowing crops to grow. By the start of the Middle Kingdom (circa 2030 to 1640 B.C.) Wepet Renpet fell near the winter solstice in December, Belmonte noted.
Ancient Egyptians had multiple New Year’s celebrations
At times, the Egyptians celebrated multiple Wepet Renpet festivals within a single year, Leo Depuydt, a professor emeritus of Egyptology and Assyriology at Brown University, told Live Science in an email.
At the Temple of Khnum (also known as the Temple of Esna), located south of Luxor (ancient Thebes), a calendar inscribed on a wall has three Wepet Renpet festivals marked within a single year, Depuydt wrote in a 2003 paper published in the Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt. The calendar dates to sometime between the mid-first century and the mid-third century A.D., when the Roman Empire ruled Egypt.
In the paper, Depuydt interpreted the calendar as revealing that Wepet Renpet festivals were celebrated on the first day of the calendar year, on the birthday of the Roman emperor, and finally, when the star Sirius rose “from below the eastern horizon just after Sirius has been invisible for a couple of months.” In 2023, archaeologists reported finding a scene on the temple’s ceiling that may present a mythological depiction of the new year when Sirius rises.
Ancient Egyptian celebrations and gifts
The ancient Egyptians’ celebrations would have included both worshipping deities and remembering the dead, Masashi Fukaya, an independent researcher, wrote in a doctoral thesis that was published in the book “The Festivals of Opet, the Valley, and the New Year: Their Socio-Religious Functions” (Archaeopress EgyptologyArchaeology, 2020).
For instance, festivities took place by the Pyramids of Giza because texts from temples at Giza and Saqqara named Wepet Renpet as an important festival, Belmonte said.
During Wepet Renpet, statues depicting the deities “were taken out into daylight — for instance on the temple’s roof — in order to be regenerated by means of the sun’s rays,” Simon Connor, an archaeologist at the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology (IFAO), wrote in his book “Ancient Egyptian Statues: Their Many Lives and Deaths” (The American University in Cairo Press, 2022). Sometimes, the statues would be replaced by new ones during Wepet Renpet, Connor wrote.
New Year’s Eve also included feasts, according to scenes on some ancient Egyptian tombs, Fukaya wrote. Another custom involved exchanging gifts that wished someone a Happy New Year.
“The most famous object type relating to [the] new year is the ‘new year flask’, a lentoid vessel, typically made of faience,” or glazed ceramic, John Baines, a professor emeritus of Egyptology at the University of Oxford, told Live Science in an email. Some of these flasks contain inscriptions wishing the recipient a Happy New Year. “The flasks are for liquids and have a rather small capacity — perhaps suitable for scented oils rather than drinks,” Baines said.
An example, now housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, was created for a priest named Amenhotep. The flask contains inscriptions that “ask the gods Montu and Amun-Re to grant Amenhotep a Happy New Year,” the museum reported. “Filled perhaps with perfume, oil, or water from the Nile, it would have been a gift associated with the celebration of the beginning of the year.”
