Heliopolis (Ancient Egypt)

The Al-Masalla obelisk, the largest surviving monument from Heliopolis

Heliopolis (/ˌhiːliːˈɒpoʊlᵻs/; Greek: Ἡλιούπολις, Hēlioúpolis, "City of the Sun" or "City of Helios"; Egyptian: ỉwnw) was one of the oldest cities of ancient Egypt, the capital of the 13th or Heliopolite Nome of Lower Egypt. It is now found in the suburb of Ayn Shams (Arabic: عين شمس‎‎, lit. "Well of the Sun") at the north-east edge of Cairo.

The ancient Egyptian cult center Iunu, named "On" in the Hebrew bible, was renamed Heliopolis by the Greeks in recognition of the fact that the sun god Ra (Helios in Greek) presided there. Iunu is mentioned in the Pyramid Text as the "House of Ra".

Heliopolis has been occupied since the Predynastic Period, with extensive building campaigns during the Old and Middle Kingdoms. Today it is mostly destroyed; its temples and other buildings were used for the construction of medieval Cairo. Most information about the ancient city comes from textual sources.

The only surviving remnant of Heliopolis is the Temple of Re-Atum obelisk located in Al-Masalla in Al-Matariyyah, Cairo. It was erected by Senusret I of the Twelfth dynasty, and still stands in its original position. The 68 ft (20.73 m) high red granite obelisk weighs 120 tons (240,000 lbs).

Location

Beneath a maze of busy narrow streets of north-east Cairo, about fifteen to twenty metres down, lie vast hidden remains of ancient Heliopolis. The modern inhabitants are mostly middle and lower-class Egyptians.

The site of ancient Heliopolis lies predominantly in the northern Cairo suburb of Al-Matariyyah, and also covers the districts of Ain Shams and Tel Al-Hisn east of the Nile. It also straddles the Cairo Metro line 1.5 km (1 mile) west of the edge of the 20th century modern Heliopolis, a suburb in the district Maṣr el-Gedīda (Arabic: مصر الجديدة‎‎  "New Egypt").

The site of Heliopolis has now been brought for the most part under cultivation and suburbanization, but some ancient city walls of crude brick can be seen in the fields, a few granite blocks bearing the name of Ramesses II remain, and the position of the great Temple of Re-Atum is marked by the Al-Masalla obelisk. Archaeologists made recent tomb discoveries underneath.

Etymology

or
Iunu in hieroglyphs

The name Heliopolis is of ancient Greek origin, Ἡλιούπολις, meaning city of the sun as it was the principal seat of worship of the sun god Ra and the closely related deity Atum. Originally, this ancient city was known by the Egyptians as Iunu, from the transliteration ỉwnw, probably pronounced *Āwanu, and means "(Place of) Pillars". In biblical Hebrew Heliopolis was referred to as, Ôn (אן‎) or Āwen (און‎), Ancient Greek: Ὂν.

Worship

The chief cult centre of Ra was Heliopolis (called Iunu, "Place of Pillars", in Egyptian), where he was identified with the local sun-god Atum. Through Atum, or as Atum-Ra he was also seen as the first being and the originator of the Ennead, consisting of Shu and Tefnut, Geb and Nut, Osiris, Set, Isis and Nephthys.

History

Map of ancient Lower Egypt showing Heliopolis

Egyptian Heliopolis

The Egyptian god Atum, was the chief deity of the city Iunu (Heliopolis), who was worshipped in the primary temple, known as Per-Aat (*Par-ʻĀʼat, written pr-ꜥꜣt, 'Great House') and Per-Atum (*Par-ʼAtāma, written pr-ỉtmw 'Temple [lit. 'House'] of Atum"'; Hebrew: פתם Pithom). Iunu was also the original source of the worship of the Ennead pantheon. Although in later times, as Horus gained in prominence, worship focused on the syncretic solar deity Ra-harakhty (literally Ra, [who is] Horus of the Two Horizons).

The main cult of Ra—(or Re) was in Heliopolis, however the High Priests of Ra are not as well documented as the high priests of other deities. The Al-Masalla area of the Al-Matariyyah district contains the underground tombs of High Priests of Ra of the Sixth Dynasty (c. 2345 BC—2181 BC), which were found in the southeast corner of the great Temple of Ra-Atum archaeological site.

During the Amarna Period, Pharaoh Akhenaten introduced monotheistic worship of Aton, the deified solar disc. As part of his construction projects, he built in Heliopolis a temple named Wetjes Aton (wṯs ỉtn "Elevating the Sun-disc"). Blocks from this temple were later used to build the city walls of medieval Cairo and can be seen in some of the city gates. The cult of the Mnevis bull, an embodiment of the god Ra, had its centre here, and possessed a formal burial ground north of the city.

Model of a Votive Temple Gateway at Heliopolis, Brooklyn Museum

Egyptian mythology, and later Greco-Roman mythology, said that the phoenix (Bennu), after rising from the ashes of its predecessor, would bring the ashes to the altar of the sun god in Heliopolis.

This image to the right is a reconstruction that was worked up from the early Nineteenth Dynasty base of a model temple gateway in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum (acc. no. 49.183) decorated with representations of King Sety I making offerings. The bottom of this model has been cast from the original and painted brown to match its quartzite stone. The statues, flagstaffs, pylon, and sidewalls, all of which were lost from the original, have been reconstructed to fit the depressions in the base. The result simulates the basic elements of a typical approach to a temple of the New Kingdom.

Greco-Roman Heliopolis

Heliopolis was well known to the ancient Greeks and Romans, being noted by most major geographers of the period, including Ptolemy, Herodotus and others, down to the Byzantine geographer Stephanus of Byzantium.

Greek era

Alexander the Great, on his march from Pelusium to Memphis, halted at this city (Arrian, iii. 1); and, according to Macrobius (Saturn. i. 23), Baalbek, or the Syrian Heliopolis, was a priest-colony from its Egyptian namesake.

The temple of Ra was said to have been, to a special degree, a depository for royal records, and Herodotus states that the priests of Heliopolis were the best informed in matters of history of all the Egyptians. Heliopolis flourished as a seat of learning during the Greek period; the schools of philosophy and astronomy are claimed to have been frequented by Orpheus, Homer, Pythagoras, Plato, Solon, and other Greek philosophers. Ichonuphys was lecturing there in 308 BC, and the Greek mathematician Eudoxus, who was one of his pupils, learned from him the true length of the year and month, upon which he formed his octaeterid, or period of 8 years or 99 months. Ptolemy II had Manetho, the chief priest of Heliopolis, collect his history of the ancient kings of Egypt from its archives. The later Ptolemies probably took little interest in their "father" Ra, and Alexandria had eclipsed the learning of Heliopolis; thus with the withdrawal of royal favour Heliopolis quickly dwindled, and the students of native lore deserted it for other temples supported by a wealthy population of pious citizens. By the 1st century BC, in fact, Strabo found the temples deserted, and the town itself almost uninhabited, although priests were still present.

Roman era

In Roman times Heliopolis belonged to the Augustamnica province, whence it was sometimes distinguished as Heliopolis in Augustamnica. This remains the name of its titular see in Catholicism. Its population probably contained a considerable Arabic element. (Plin. vi. 34.) In Roman times obelisks were taken from its temples to adorn the northern cities of the Delta, and even across the Mediterranean to Rome, including the famed Cleopatra's Needle that now resides on the Thames embankment, London (this obelisk was part of a pair, the other being located in Central Park, New York). Finally the growth of Fustat and Cairo, only 6 miles (9.7 km) to the southwest, caused the ruins to be ransacked for building materials. The site was known to the Arabs as ʻAyn Šams ("the well of the sun"), more recently as ʻArab al-Ḥiṣn.

Biblical Heliopolis

Heliopolis was the capital of the Province of Goshen, country that comprised much of the northern Egyptian territory of the Nile Delta. This was one of three main store-city locations that grain was kept during the winter months and during the seven year famine discussed in the Joseph narrative of the Book of Genesis. The city gained recognition as place of bread.

In the time of the major prophets, Isaiah made a reference to the City of the Sun as one of the five cities of Egypt that would come to speak Hebrew. However he made a wordplay on "city of the sun" (’ir hašemeš) by writing ’ir haheres which literally means "city of destruction". These play of words were a prophetic description later reinforced by both Jeremiah and Ezekiel. The Hebrew name, Beth-shemesh, where Beth means "house" and shemesh means "Sun" was also used to describe Heliopolis by Jeremiah. He prophesied this city's fate specifically when he declared that the king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, would shatter the obelisks of Heliopolis and burn the temple of the sun in fire. Jeremiah’s contemporary Ezekiel, reinforced this message by saying that the "young men of Aven (or Beth-Aven) would fall by the sword". Like Isaiah, Ezekiel also made a word play on the original Hebrew name of Heliopolis that was used in the time of Joseph, the city of On. The Hebrew word aven means "folly" or "iniquity", so that his reference implied "temple of folly" or "temple of iniquity".

See also

• Other Heliopolises, particularly
  • Heliopolis Syriaca, the modern Baalbek in Lebanon
  • Heliopolis, the 20th-century suburb of Cairo
  • Ilioupoli, the 20th-century suburb of Athens settled by Egyptian Greeks
• Ancient Egyptian creation myths – in reference to the religious belief system of Iunu at Heliopolis
• List of Egyptian dynasties – in reference to the reigns centered at Heliopolis
• Benben

References

Bibliography

• Allen, James P. 2001. "Heliopolis". In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, edited by Donald Bruce Redford. Vol. 2 of 3 vols. Oxford, New York, and Cairo: Oxford University Press and The American University in Cairo Press. 88–89
• Redford, Donald Bruce. 1992. "Heliopolis". In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, edited by David Noel Freedman. Vol. 3 of 6 vols. New York: Doubleday. 122–123
• Bilolo, Mubabinge. 1986. Les cosmo-théologies philosophiques d'Héliopolis et d'Hermopolis. Essai de thématisation et de systématisation, (Academy of African Thought, Sect. I, vol. 2), Kinshasa–Munich 1987; new ed., Munich-Paris, 2004.
• Collier, Mark and Manley, Bill. How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs: Revised Edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
• The Routledge Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses, George Hart ISBN 0-415-34495-6
• Reallexikon der Ägyptischen Religionsgeschichte - Hans Bonnet
•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: 

External links

• Windows Live Local: The Site of ancient Heliopolis
• Obelisk of Psametik II from Heliopolis, removed and reerected by Augustus in Rome