The feast calendar of Nyuserra’s sun temple. Festivals, rites and economy at the crossroads.

The feast calendar from the sun temple of Nyuserra at Abu Ghurab was found by Ludwig Borchardt in 1901 during the latest phases of excavation of the sun temple. It is composed of a considerable number of inscribed fragments, not always matching with one another, which, according to Borchardt’s reconstruction, should have originally formed two similar inscriptions placed at both sides of the main entrance gate of the valley temple. The basic understanding of this calendar is mostly due to the seminal work carried out in 1977 by Wolfgang Helck, who first edited all the fragments together and suggested a reconstruction of these festivals’ list in its original setting. Helck’s work remains a milestone for our view of the subject. Nevertheless, the high degree of arbitrariness of Helck’s reconstruction – often not based on solid archaeological and textual evidence – has provoked several mistakes in the following scholarship, given that his reconstruction has often been taken for granted. In this paper, starting from Helck’s work and moving through all the most recent studies, I will thus discuss many aspects of this feast calendar, which is not only one of the most complete in the whole history of ancient Egypt but also the oldest example so far known. Additionally, a special focus will be put on the religious implications that these festivals had on the royal ideology of the time as well as on their impact on the economy of Fifth Dynasty Egypt.