Heliopolis

“ This city was a centre of literary {52} learning and of theologic theorising which was unknown elsewhere in Egypt, but familiar in Mesopotamia. A conical stone was the embodiment of the god at Heliopolis, as in Syria. On, the native name of Heliopolis, occurs twice in Syria, as well as other cities named Heliopolis there in later times. The view of an early Semitic principate of Heliopolis, before the dynastic age, would unify all of these facts: and the advance of Ra worship in the fifth dynasty would be due to a revival of the influence of the eastern Delta at that time. ”

“ Neither was anything else of the phantom tavern, Starhouse. Not that nor even Heliopolis itself.
He was alone in the barren desert and arid sand dunes stretched as far as he could see. Yet on the horizon was the faint suggestion of the towers that might be Heliopolis beyond the sands. But he knew it was no use trying to find his way there by walking. The mirages of Mars are treacherous beyond reason.
Roal got to his feet and felt at his waist for the tiny SBI transmitter that could place him in communication with the SBI office in Heliopolis. ”

“ Beneath an awning spread above the balcony of one of those modern elegant flats, which today characterize Heliopolis, the City of the Sun, site of perhaps the most ancient seat of learning in the known world, a party of four was gathered, awaiting the unique spectacle which is afforded when the sun’s dying rays fade from the Libyan sands and the violet wonder of the afterglow conjures up old magical Egypt from the ashes of the desert. ”

“ The people of Heliopolis accepted the new names and the new forms presented for their worship, but always subordinated them to their beloved Râ. For them Râ never ceased to be the god of the nome; while Atûmû remained the god of the theologians, and was invoked by them, the people preferred Râ. At Thinis and at Sebennytos Anhûri incurred the same fate as befell Râ at Heliopolis. After he had been identified with the sun, the similar identification of Shû inevitably followed. Of old, Anhûri and Shû were twin gods, incarnations of sky and earth. ”

“ Active and powerful is the heir of the temple; the Active one of Heliopolis. The flesh of his flesh (5) is the All-seer, for he hath the might divine as the Son whom the Father hath begotten. And his will is that of the Mighty one of Heliopolis.
I know the Powers of Heliopolis; they are Rā, Shu and Tefnut.
Notes. The ancient text of this chapter has most unfortunately been lost. A few words only remain in the fragments of Papyrus Pm. M. Naville has also published what is found on an ostracon of the time of the XVIIIth dynasty. ”

“ Lord of the diadems of Upper and Lower Egypt, Month or Mandou of the world; possessor of Egypt; the resplendent Horus, the Osiris, the divine priest of Thoré; the king, Pharaoh, establisher of justice, who renders illustrious the everlasting edifices of Heliopolis, by foundations fit for the support of the heaven; who has established, honoured, and adorned the Temple of the Sun and the rest of the gods; which has been sanctified by him, the son of the sun, Menephtha-Sethai, the beloved of the spirits of Heliopolis, everlasting like the sun. ”

“ Heliopolis became the chief focus in the north, from which civilization radiated over the rich plains and the marshes of the Delta. Its colleges of priests had collected, condensed, and arranged the principal myths of the local religions; the Ennead to which it gave conception would never have obtained the popularity which we must acknowledge it had, if its princes had not exercised, for at least some period, an actual suzerainty over the neighbouring plains. It was around Heliopolis that the kingdom of Lower Egypt was organized ”

“ About fifteen centuries before the Christian era, in the reign of Thothmes III., by royal command, the London Obelisk, together with its companion column, was quarried at Syene, and thence in a huge raft was floated down the Nile to the sacred city of Heliopolis, a distance of seven hundred miles. Heliopolis, called in the Bible On, and by the ancient Egyptians An, was a city of temples dedicated to the worship of the sun. ”

“ From thence and as far as Heliopolis inland Egypt is broad, and the land is all flat and without springs of water and formed of mud: and the road as one goes inland from the sea to Heliopolis is about the same in length as that which leads from the altar of the twelve gods at Athens to Pisa and the temple of Olympian Zeus: reckoning up you would find the difference very small by which these roads fail of being equal in length, not more indeed than fifteen furlongs ”

“ Moreover I visited both Thebes and Heliopolis for this very cause, namely because I wished to know whether the priests at these places would agree in their accounts with those at Memphis; for the men of Heliopolis are said to be the most learned in records of the Egyptians. Those of their narrations which I heard with regard to the gods I am not earnest to relate in full, but I shall name them only because I consider that all men are equally ignorant of these matters: and whatever things of them I may record I shall record only because I am compelled by the course of the story. ”

“ The pyramidions were sheathed in bright metal, catching and reflecting the sun’s rays as if they were thrones of the sunlight. They were dedicated to solar deities, and were especially numerous at Heliopolis, where there was probably a single one sacred to the sun of immemorial antiquity. ”

“ A village called Matarieh stands near where the city of Heliopolis once stood. Here a sycamore was shown to us under which Joseph and the Virgin Mary and Infant Saviour are said to have rested when they fled into Egypt from King Herod. The gardens of Matarieh were in former times famed for their balsams. They were first brought from Judea, and were of the same species as trees from which was made the "Balm of Gilead" that we read of in the Bible.
Heliopolis, the "City of the Sun," was so called because in ancient times there was a magnificent temple in it which was dedicated to the sun. ”

“ Heliopolis was the centre of his worship, where Senusert I, in the twelfth dynasty, rebuilt the temple and erected the obelisks, one of which is still standing. But Ra was preceded there by another sun-god Atmu, who was the true god of the nome; and Ra, though worshipped throughout the land, was not the aboriginal god of any city. In Heliopolis he was attached to Atmu, at Thebes attached to Amen. These facts point to Ra having been introduced into Egypt by a conquering people, after the theologic settlement of the whole land. ”

“ The trip from the airport took over an hour. It led through Heliopolis, City of the Sun, the first capital of a united Egypt. The land had been governed for over a thousand years from Heliopolis. But that, as Dr. Kerama explained, was over four thousand years ago.
Rick was awed. Coming from a new land where a hundred years seemed a very long time, the antiquity of Egypt stirred his imagination. But there was little that seemed ancient in modern Heliopolis. There were attractive, modern apartment houses, new public buildings, and rows of trees carefully trimmed into perfect green cylinders. ”

“ In the neighbourhood of Memphis lay Heliopolis, the town of the sun-god, with its ancient temple, and a school of Egyptian wisdom, in which Plato is supposed to have studied.
In Heliopolis the worship of the god Ra was preserved, the centre of which was the holy animal Mnevis, a rival or comrade of Apis. Cambyses had partly destroyed the temple and even the obelisks which the Pharaohs had in the course of centuries erected to the sun-god; nowhere in Egypt existed so many of these monuments as here and in Thebes. Hadrian saw many of them lying half-burnt on the ground just as Strabo had done. ”

“ The drive to Heliopolis is well worth taking on its own account. I found by the wayside a greater variety of culture, and of plants, than elsewhere in Egypt; oranges, lemons, ricinus, (which, with its spikes of red flowers and broad leaves, is, here, a handsome plant,) cactuses, vineyards, olive-trees, Australian eucalyptuses, and many other trees and plants.
Before I went to Heliopolis I asked a Scotchman I found myself seated next to at dinner one day at the table d’hôte, whether it was worth one’s while to go? ”

“ When we got back to the tarven we found that Robert Strong had been delayed by a visitor and wuz jest startin’ for Heliopolis, and Miss Meechim and I bein’ all ready we turned round and went with ’em.
Heliopolis hain’t so grand lookin’ as its name. It is a little Arab town six miles from Cairo. The low houses are made of mud and nasty inside, I believe; they don’t look much like Jonesville houses. The oldest and greatest college once stood here. Here, too, wuz the hant of that immortal bird, the Phenix, who raised himself to life every five hundred years. ”

“ In Hermopolis the conception of creation, not by voice merely, but even by the mere sound of the voice, was first formed and worked out while Heliopolis was the source of that arrangement of the deities into groups of nine which led to the identification of the gods one with another, and so prepared the way for monotheism.7 If Heliopolis were indeed, as seems probable, the first home of this religious theory, its influence upon the rest of Egypt was profound. ”

“ At one time Heliopolis was a thriving city and is referred to in the Bible as "On," but to-day the obelisk stands alone in the midst of cultivated fields, all the buildings having disappeared.
While the obelisk at Heliopolis outranks all others in age, the one at Karnak, in the suburbs of Luxor, has the distinction of being the [317] tallest one yet remaining. ”

“ Heliopolis is said to be the site of the most ancient city of Egypt. It is otherwise called On and sometimes Noph; but nothing remains [40] of it except a fine obelisk of granite covered with hieroglyphics, and about sixty-five feet high: perhaps there is no column still standing erect of greater antiquity. There was here a great Temple of the Sun, and the patriarch Joseph’s wife is mentioned as a daughter of a priest or prince of On. ”

“ They invoked it as a whole, after the two others, in those formulas in which they called into play all the creative and preservative forces of the universe; but this was rather as a matter of conscience and from love of precision than out of any true deference. At the initial impulse of the lord of Heliopolis, the three combined Enneads started the world and kept it going, and gods whom they had not incorporated were either enemies to be fought with, or mere attendants.
The doctrine of the Heliopolitan Ennead acquired an immediate and a lasting popularity. ”

“ That the statement is historically correct, may be gathered from the fact that the temples of Memphis and Heliopolis were dedicated to Ptaḥ and Tum, and not to Apis and Mnevis. When they were built the divinity of the bull had not yet been officially recognised. The gods in whose honour they were founded were gods of human form, and gods of human form they continued to be. Down to the last days of Egyptian paganism the sun-god of Heliopolis was not a bull, but a man ”

“ If, as there is reason to believe, she was born near Heliopolis, it is easy to understand how her influence may have led Amenôthes to pay special honour to a Heliopolitan divinity. He had built, at an early period of his reign, a sanctuary to Atonû at Memphis, and in the Xth year he constructed for him a chapel at Thebes itself,* to the south of the last pylon of ïhûtmosis III., and endowed this deity with property at the expense of Anion. ”

“ It is an illusion common to all peoples; as their insatiable thirst for happiness is never assuaged by the present, they fall back upon the remotest past in search of an age when that supreme felicity which is only known to them as an ideal was actually enjoyed by their ancestors. Râ dwelt in Heliopolis, and the most ancient portion of the temple of the city, that known as the "Mansion of the Prince"—Haït Sarû,—passed for having been his palace. His court was mainly composed of gods and goddesses, and they as well as he were visible to men. ”

“ It is not at all improbable that the state ment of Macrobius in his Saturnalia may be founded on the tradition of a real and potent connection between Heliopolis and its Egyptian namesake. It is mentioned by Josephus (Ant., xiv. 3, 4) , Pliny (Nat. Hist., v. 22) , and Ptolemy, and coins of the city have been found belonging to the reigns of almost all the emperors from Nerva to Gallienus. ”

“ When the people go to Heliopolis and Buto they offer sacrifice only. At Papremis sacrifice is offered and rites performed as elsewhere; but when the sun is sinking, while a few of the priests are left to busy themselves with the image, the greater number of them beset the entrance of the temple, with clubs of wood in their hands; they are confronted by more than a thousand men, all performing vows and all carrying wooden clubs like the rest. The image of the god, in a little wooden gilt casket, is carried on the day before this from the temple to another sacred chamber. ”

“ These walls have large sculptured figures, very much like the Tyrrhenian (Etruscan) and very ancient works among the Greeks.
There is also a building with a great number of pillars, as at Memphis, in the barbaric style; for, except the magnitude and number and rows of pillars, there is nothing pleasing nor easily described,850 but rather a display of labour wasted.
29. At Heliopolis we saw large buildings in which the priests lived. For it is said that anciently this was the principal residence of the priests, who studied philosophy and astronomy. ”