EGYPTIANS will celebrate on Monday the spring festival, popularly known as Sham el-Nissem, which dates back to the time of the Pharaohs. "Sham el-Nessim", which literally means smelling the breeze, has been Copts and Muslims who have this common bond of this festival going back to the Pharaohs. To prepare for this spectacular event, the Cairo Governorate has started a comprehensive plan for cleaning the public gardens, which will receive hundreds of thousands of Egyptian families whose members will consume huge amounts of boiled eggs, fiseekh (the type of salted raw Nile fish ), and onions which the pharaohs offered their gods during the same festival more than four thousand years ago. From Aswan in the south to Alexandria in the north, children mark Sham el- Nessim by painting boiled eggs, a tradition invented by Ancient Egyptians to symbolise rebirth.