The exclusive rights to the soundtrack of Saturday's Pharaohs Golden Parade have been acquired by Lebanon-born music streaming platform Anghami.
The songs and musical compositions were certainly some of the parade’s main highlights, garnering a great deal of praise from spectators, both in Egypt and abroad.
An original composition by Hesham Nazih was performed by Egypt’s United Philharmonic Orchestra, which included 120 veteran musicians and 100 singers, conducted by Nader Abassi.
Following the parade, social media erupted with commentary about some of the night's most compelling performers, including percussionist Radwa El Beheiry.
Watch Egypt’s mummy parade in two minutes
While there were many singers involved, three leading ladies – Riham Abdelhakim, Amira Selim and Nesma Mahgoub – have been singled out for their powerful vocal stylings, but also for their fashion, which took on an Ancient Egyptian theme for the occasion.
One of Egypt's most celebrated singers, Mohamed Mounir, also dropped a new single called Ana Masr (I Am Egypt), which he was commissioned to perform specially for the parade.
Mounir's popularity is ubiquitous in Egypt as he enjoys widespread acclaim across the country's varied socioeconomic classes.
The Egyptian government leaned heavily on star power to give the parade more gravitas, with many of Mena’s hottest celebrities making appearances throughout the night.
“What many people don’t know is that the main song of the night was sung in Ancient Egyptian,” says Arto Belekdanian, an Egyptologist at the Tourism Ministry’s science division. "We put a great deal of work into making sure the lyrics and our translations of them were all correct."
Spectator Farah Magdy, an interior designer, said this attention to detail on the lyrics made everything much more "authentic". "I mean, the singers were singing in Ancient Egyptian, I had never seen that before and I was impressed."
It wasn't only the lyrics that were authentic, as the song was also reportedly composed on instruments that would have been around in ancient Egypt. This includes the sistrum, rattles, tambourines, bells and cymbals, as well as stringed instruments such as lyres, harps and the lute.
The parade, which saw 22 royal mummies paraded through Cairo, was one of the most talked-about events across the world earlier this week and its success has inspired the Egyptian government to host similar ceremonies in the future to promote the country’s tourism sector, which took a major hit because of Covid-19 travel bans.
This includes a parade for boy-king Tutankhamun, as it moves from the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir to the Grand Egyptian Museum.
