Archaeologists say they have found evidence amid the ruins of a temple in Luxor of an annual rite that featured sex, drugs and the ancient equivalent of rock ‘n’ roll.

Back in 1470 B.C., Egypt’s most raucous rituals, the “festival of drunkenness,”  celebrated nothing less than the salvation of humanity, according to Johns Hopkins University’s Betsy Bryan, who has been leading an excavation effort at the Temple of Mut since 2001.

The temple excavations turned up what appears to have been a “porch of drunkenness,” associated with the reign of Hatshepsut.

Some of the inscriptions that were uncovered at the temple link the drunkenness festival with “traveling through the marshes,” which Bryan said was an ancient Egyptian euphemism for having sex.

The rules for the ritual even called for a select few to stay sober — serving as “designated drivers” for the drunkards, she said. On the morning after, musicians walked around, beating their drums to wake up the revelers.

The festival — which was held during the first month of the year, just after the first flooding of the Nile — re-enacted the myth of Sekhmet.

According to the myth, the bloodthirsty Sekhmet nearly destroyed all humans, but the sun god Re tricked her into drinking mass quantities of ochre-colored beer, thinking it was blood. Once Sekhmet passed out, she was transformed into Hathor, and humanity was saved.

Beer, made from fermented barley bread, was the drink of choice for the festival of drunkenness as celebrated at the Temple of Mut. Another ritual, celebrated several months later in the year and known as the “festival of the beautiful valley,” called for the celebrants to get drunk on wine, laced with lotus flowers to promote sleepiness. The lotus could also induce vomiting — which is depicted in some Egyptian wall paintings.

Excerpted from an article by Alan Boyle for msnbc.com

Dr Bryan gave a fascinating insight into the Festivals of drunkenness. Now being drunk was not socially acceptable and there is wisdom literature support that moral stance. However there is much that encourages people to get drunk in order to experience God. This has links with the story of Hathor being made drunk in order to stop her destroying mankind. Mut is linked with Sekmet and Bast which is why there are so many statues of Sekmet from that temple. It seems that a part of the religious worship was to get so drunk you passed out and just before you did you experienced the divine. They even had ‘designated drivers’ who would look after you so you could lose control in a very controlled situation.

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Two sphinxes representing Tiy and Amenhotep III as well as 10 statues in black granite of the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet were also found by the archeologists.

The site was once the mortuary temple of Amenhotep III, one of the most important rulers of the 18th dynasty, a glorious period of Egyptian history. The temple, believed to have been the largest of its kind, was destroyed in a devastating earthquake in the 1st century AD. Its foundations were by then heavily debilitated by the constant flooding of the Nile.

Culture Minister Faruq Hosni told reporters that the statues, along with two 50 foot (15 meters) high statues excavated in recent years, will be placed behind the Colossi of Memnon, the world known twin massive statues that command the road to the Valley of the Kings, as part of an open air museum.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080322/lf_afp/egyptarcheology_080322202539