Sed festival

[2] The ancient festival might, perhaps, have been instituted to replace a ritual of murdering a pharaoh who was unable to continue to rule effectively because of age or condition.

Sed festivals implied elaborate temple rituals and included processions, offerings, and such acts of religious devotion as the ceremonial raising of a djed, the base or sacrum of a bovine spine, a phallic symbol representing the strength, "potency and duration of the pharaoh's rule".

[7] Despite the antiquity of the Sed festival and the hundreds of references to it throughout the history of ancient Egypt, the most detailed records of the ceremonies—apart from the reign of Amenhotep III—come mostly from "relief cycles of the Fifth Dynasty king Neuserra... in his sun temple at Abu Ghurab, of Akhenaten at East Karnak, and the relief cycles of the Twenty-second Dynasty king Osorkon II... at Bubastis.

The two boundary stones would have functioned as symbolic reminders of Djoser's dominion over Upper and Lower Egypt, and their placement within his mortuary complex would allow the king to continue carrying out the Heb-Sed in perpetuity after his death.

[13][14] Given the subsequent First Intermediate Period, there is a lack of extant monuments and other manifestations of centralized state activity, creating a void of any evidence of a Sed festival after the Sixth Dynasty.

Amenemhat I, based on evidence provided by foundation blocks in his pyramid, appears to have ruled coregent with his son Senusret I.

Some Egyptologists, such as Jürgen von Beckerath in his book Chronology of the Egyptian Pharaohs, speculate that Hatshepsut may have celebrated her first Sed jubilee to mark the passing of 30 years from the death of her father, Thutmose I, from whom she derived all of her legitimacy to rule Egypt.

Akhenaten established Tell-el Amarna for the sole worship of Aten, an unprecedented action by a pharaoh, which could explain as to why he would want to consolidate religious and political power.