Location
Heliopolis
Geographical coordinates:31°05’N, 31°20’E
Heliopolis (the city of the Sun) is the name given by the Greeks to the ancient city of Onou (or Onou-Iounou).
It was the capital of the thirteenth nome of Lower Egypt.
The first constructions date from the 27th century BC. J.-C..
The site now bears the Arabic name of Aîn-ech-Chams (the Eye of the Sun).
Religious metropolis of the Old Kingdom
Solar city, people worshiped there deities linked to the Sun:
* The god Khepri, representing the reborn Sun;
* The god Re, the Sun at its zenith;
* The god Atum, the setting Sun;
* The Benou (ancestor of the Phoenix);
* The bull god Mnevis, living hypostasis of Ra.
It is here that the holy Ennead, or assembly of the nine gods who, descended from Re, symbolized the creation of the world was venerated:
* Ra - the sun - the divine fire,
* Shou - air - divine breath,
* Tefnut - moisture - the divine seed,
* Geb - the earth,
* Nut - the celestial vault,
* Ausare (Osiris),
*Aset (Isis),
*Seth,
* Nephthys.
Many mythologies flowed from this cosmogony including that of Aset (Isis) and Ausare (Osiris), Seth and Hor (Horus), Sekhmet, the Eye of Re, etc.
The city was also the seat of a cult of Hathor, Lady of the Sycamore, and it was at Onou that in the middle of a sacred wood was the legendary sacred perséa on the fruits of which Djehouty (Thoth) inscribed the names of every ruler, heir to the throne of Horus.
In the Old Kingdom, the cult of Re probably entered into competition with that of the god Ptah worshiped in the neighboring city of Memphis and whose cult is attested from the Thinite period. Indeed the first royal dynasties which followed according to the myth the divine ancestors on the throne of Horus, chose for necropolis the site of Saqqarah close to the city of the god Ptah and this until the Third Dynasty, defining at the same time the location of the early royal residence.
The 4th dynasty then marks a turning point not only in the choice of royal necropolises (Giza is geographically opposite Heliopolis) but also in the resolutely solar aspect of the pyramidal architecture. We recently discovered a whole district of the city which had been built at Gizeh, starting from Khoufu - the Cheops of the Greeks - as well as a palace complex attesting to a movement of the court further north, near the city of the sun. One theory would even confirm that from the temple of the sun god you could see all the pyramids of the 4th dynasty, which at the same time became an inevitable landmark from the royal funerary sites.
According to legend, the 5th dynasty arose from the union of Rê and one of the priestesses of the temple of Onou. In fact, the Pharaohs of the 5th dynasty built, in addition to their funerary complexes of Per-Ausar (Abusir) north of Saqqara, solar temples whose main element was the Benben, a massive obelisk built on a platform. The general plan of the great temple of Re should be compared to those of the solar temples of the pharaohs of this dynasty found at Abu Ghorab and Per-Ausar from which they would have been inspired. A rising causeway connecting two temples, the main one comprising a massive masonry obelisk which dominates an open-air courtyard in the center of which was a solar altar formed of a disc framed by “hotep” signs, intended to receive daily offerings. This hypothesis has never been verified on the site of the old Onou.
It was also at the end of this period that the first texts of the pyramids appeared, which experienced great development in the royal vaults of the 6th dynasty. These sacred texts form the first theological corpus of which we have such an ancient trace and are certainly the fruit of long study and patient theological work. They clearly associate the resurrection of the king with the rebirth of the solar star, further linking the royal character to his divine future, including in the afterlife.
The Temple of Re
Of this sacred city, the third city of the country after Waset, (Thebes) and Men-Nefer (Memphis), described by Herodotus as the most learned, with its great temple dedicated to the Sun Rê and its quarters for the priests, there remains nothing left except part of the layout of the enclosure of the main sanctuary and an obelisk of Senusert I (Sesostris I) of the XIIth dynasty of the Middle Kingdom which undoubtedly marked with others the entrance to one of the main temples.
Half of the area identified and described in the 19th century by the various first explorers, from the Egyptian Campaign to the soundings carried out by Hékékyan, is currently under the modern city and the rest is today surrounded by fences and walls delimiting a space larger than that of Karnak in Thebes, and henceforth protected against the inexorable advance of the city of Cairo.
It was thus the largest religious enclosure in Egypt with nearly a kilometer in length and a width of more than 500 meters. Divided in the middle by a wall separating it into two parts of unequal size, it opened to the east by a large door whose traces would be to be sought under the buildings of the Mataharya district and of which it is very difficult for us to restore the aspect, and to the West by a vast "portal".
The southern part of the enclosure, that which is currently visible from the open-air museum installed around the obelisk of Senusert I and which brings together the various remains discovered in the surroundings, must certainly have been the enclosure containing the temples dedicated to the three forms of the sun god.
The stele of the victories of Piankhy, a Kushite pharaoh of the XXVth dynasty, recounts the passage of the king to Heliopolis during his conquest of Egypt and gives us an overview. Entered from the east in the "House of the morning", he made an offering to Khepri after having been purified, then entered the Castle of Benben the "Hout Benben" to see his "Father" and finally passed to the temple of Atum.
This group of temples, undoubtedly linked together and forming the largest temple in Egypt, punctuated by pairs or groups of obelisks erected by the generations of kings who embellished the sanctuary, would date back to the beginning of the country's history. Remains dating from Djoser of the Third Dynasty have indeed been discovered there representing the gods Geb and Seth, two of the nine gods of the Great Ennead who was worshiped in Heliopolis.
Another document in the name of a pharaoh named Neferkare (VIth dynasty?) gives a list of statues and objects relating to the liturgy of a temple dedicated to Hathor, part of the plan of which is on the reverse of the block, remnant of a relief probably describing the gifts of Pharaoh to the solar city. A papyrus this time, dating from Amenhotep II of the 18th dynasty, describes a temple with its obelisks and its three successive pylons which gave access to large courtyards lined with porticoes.
Many obelisks therefore adorned these monuments, but they were systematically torn from the ground to adorn the great Greek and Roman cities. They have been found and re-erected in Alexandria, Rome, Constantinople, etc. In all, there are at least six large obelisks which currently adorn the squares and parks of Europe and elsewhere and which come from the solar temples.
Thus in Alexandria, "the needles of Cleopatra" which marked the entrance to the Cæsarium in Roman times, were two obelisks of Thutmose III from Heliopolis. They are now in London and New York. Another with a height of more than 23 meters dating from Seti I is in Rome and is currently in Piazza del Popolo.
Ramses II completed the decoration of the obelisk and erected numerous monuments within the enclosure of Ra with their obelisks, at least three of which were brought back to Rome. One of them is now in front of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence while the other two are still in Rome (a first in Piazza della Rotunda and the second in Viale delle Terme) like that of Neferibre Psammetichus II of the XXVI Dynasty that can be admired in the square of Palazzo Montecitorio.
A model was found in the north of the region at Tell el-Yahoudieh and dates precisely from the time of Seti I. It is a kind of stele or carved stone base, which bears on its sides and its main face a dedicatory motif of the king representing him kneeling making various offerings to Atum, while the top forming a plateau presents a difference in height crossed by a staircase with double ramp and accessing a terrace in which are designed and dug spaces that can receive added parts. Given the size and positioning of the spaces, a convincing restitution was achieved. The whole would present to us the plan of the entrance to the temple of Atum, with its monumental pylon, steeper than the Theban examples and closer to those of the Amarnians, preceded by colossi, sphinxes and obelisks, which was accessed by a no less monumental staircase.
If we compare it proportionally to the obelisk currently in Rome, assuming that it was part of the pair of obelisks indicated on the model, we can then realize the dimensions of the pylon which opened to the west of the Great Temple. of Re. Placed on a high terrace, it was to dominate the city and its port and welcomed the visitor with the brilliance of the golden pyramidions of its obelisks.
From the same reign also date the fragments of obelisks recently discovered off the island of Pharos in Alexandria and visible today in the open-air museum installed near the Roman odeon of Kom el-Dik, and which probably came from Heliopolitan temples that the King had built and consecrated to the deities of the city of the sun.
Finally, some remains of a sandstone naos, also erected by Seti at Atum, are preserved in the Cairo Museum.
We would thus have fairly precise indications of what the temple of Atum was from the 19th dynasty to the west of Heliopolis, at least for the part visible to all but also the more intimate part of the sanctuary.
The city and its divine and royal cults
It is on this side of the enclosure that the "column of victories" of Merenptah was found, a probable vestige of a temple consecrated by the successor of Ramses II which overlooked the north of the enclosure. In this northern part, the one that is no longer accessible, there was a vast area which probably housed a series of temples and sanctuaries consecrated by the kings to the sun god, like the so-called funerary temples dedicated to Amun on the west bank. from Luxor.
Recently an excavation team from the Deutsches Archaeologisches Institut discovered the remains of a temple consecrated by Ramses II, in this part covered by the city of Cairo. The team unearthed debris of all kinds there, including a colossal head as well as a statue with the names of Ramses preserved on its lower half and representing him in a priest's habit. Like many monuments from this period, re-employments, some of which date from the Amarna period and the Middle Kingdom, have also been discovered there.
It is also to the north of the precincts of the Temple of Rê, that we must look for the tombs of Mnévis, the sacred bull of Heliopolis, the "herald of Rê", who, like the god Apis in Memphis, received a cult in a sacred enclosure and at his death was mummified and buried with great pomp in his necropolis.
This tradition was interrupted under the reign of Akhenaton who transferred his cult and his necropolis to his new city dedicated to Aten, the visible form of the god Re, who will end up erasing the old cults in favor of an exclusive cult of the solar star. . We know the brevity of the experience linked almost to the duration of the reign of Akhenaton and from the end of the XVIIIth dynasty his successors reestablished the cults of the gods restoring then what had been changed.
It is therefore not surprising that there are so many vestiges dating from the Ramesside period, which devoted particular efforts to restoring the grandeur of the sanctuary and the influence of its worship. Onou and its temples have always influenced royalty and cults. Wasn't Waset (Thebes) referred to as "the Heliopolis of the South"? His cult of Amun was associated with that of Re from the Middle Kingdom, and the eastern development of his temple from the New Kingdom marked a new solar axis by a single obelisk 32 meters high, dating from Thutmose III put set up by his grandson Thutmose IV and around which Ramses II built a small temple. This gives us an idea of what were the temples dedicated to the sun god in his obelisk form, which was then called Benben. Heliopolis certainly also contained some and the evocation of the solar temples of the Old Kingdom takes on new meaning.
It is in this still solar axis but outside the enclosure of Amon-Re of Karnak, even further to the east, that the Gem Paaton is also found, the first temple dedicated to Aten by the young king Amenhotep IV. before he transferred the capital to Akhetaten. The characteristic plan of this temple, made up of pylons and open-air courtyards lined with altars for the offerings, thus seems to confirm a particular feature of the Egyptian solar temples where the offerings were offered directly to the heat of the sun. It is more than likely that Akhenaten had a temple dedicated to the solar disk Aten built in Heliopolis itself.
Ramses III, for his part, bears in his coronation name the qualifier of Héka Iounou, that is to say "Prince of Heliopolis", thus affirming his close link with the city of the sun. He had a palatial complex built a little further north of the city at Tell el-Yaoudieh, which was in some way at that time one of the suburbs of Heliopolis. Thus we found the remains of a large building built under Ramses III, and a little further north of this site a small temple built by his son and successor Ramses IV was unearthed in the 1950s.
Similarly, we know that Ramses IX concentrated his activity as a builder in Heliopolis, further in line with the choice of his predecessors to develop the sites and the role of Lower Egypt, a choice which foreshadows the definitive transfer of royal power to this part of Egypt from the Third Intermediate Period.
Until Roman times, the kings and queens of the late period and then of the Ptolemaic period adorned the sanctuary, feeding and responding to the centuries-old link of royalty with the god Ra. Wasn't the royal name itself preceded from the origins by the official title of Son of Rê in ancient Egyptian:Sa Rê. The monuments and sculptures of the XXVIth Dynasty and the XXXth Dynasty attest to this close link which will be reaffirmed by the last Pharaohs of local stock, restoring and rebuilding where the Assyrian then Persian invaders passed, looting and destroying these holy places.
With the arrival of Alexander the Great and subsequently the rise to power of the Lagide dynasty, Heliopolis still lives for a time in the heart of royalty, even if the activity of these last sovereigns focused more on their new capital. on the shores of the Mediterranean. It was in Heliopolis that Manetho, priest of the cult of Ra, consulted the archives of the temple in order to write the history of the country, thus responding to an order from Ptolemy who then reigned over the country after the conquest of Alexander. Many statues, sphinxes, commemorative stelae, colossi, and of course the obelisks therefore attest to the fervor of solar worship until Augustus took power.
From the latter, in fact, the nature of power changed and the very title of the king was transformed, signaling the definitive estrangement of the link between the monarch and the land of the Pharaohs.
Shadow of the Sun City
Strabo in the 1st century BC. J.-C., who visited the city at the beginning of the Roman period, describes to us "its ancient temple and built in the Egyptian manner" as preceded by a monumental dromos, obelisks - quoting those which have already been transferred to Rome for the Emperor - and made up of at least three successive pylons, successive courtyards, specifying that he saw "no statue in human form, except that of some animal deprived of speech".
The city was then abandoned, eclipsed for almost 300 years by the other city of light, Alexandria, which had become the new Lighthouse of civilization.
More delivered to the pillage, the monuments and statues of the pious city of Heliopolis, served like other sites as quarries at different later times to form only a vast empty space, a paradoxical negative of what was for three millennia the seat of intense spiritual and intellectual activity.
During Bonaparte's expedition at the end of the 18th century, the scholars who accompanied him surveyed the gigantic enclosure, still preserved at a good height, with its transverse wall as well as its obelisk, the only witness of this temple. and its priests who attracted so many intellectuals and scholars of antiquity.
Strabo of course, but also Diodorus of Sicily, Herodotus of Halicarnassus and according to tradition, Hecataeus of Miletus, Eudoxus of Cnidus, Plato, Pythagoras, etc. would have stayed there for long periods, drawing the bases of their work from the old fund of knowledge accumulated by the priests of the god Rê.
They are for us irreplaceable witnesses and transmit to us a little of this light which once radiated from Heliopolis on the emerging civilizations of the West and the Greco-Roman East.
Modern Age
The city of Miṣr al-ǧidīdah, the modern Heliopolis, was created by the Heliopolis Oasis Company of Baron Empain, a Belgian industrialist, from 1905. The company bought a large parcel of desert northwest of Cairo at a low price in colonial government. A railway line was built, and roads, plantations and water were installed there. The city was initially populated by foreigners and Copts (Christian Egyptians). Over time, it was populated by the middle classes of Cairo. With the growth of the city of Cairo, it has now bridged the distance with Heliopolis which is now a district. Overcrowding has led to the disappearance of many gardens.