Heliopolis (Jwnw, Iunu; , 'the Pillars'; , ; ) was a major city of

ancient Egypt Ancient Egypt () was a cradle of civilization concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in Northeast Africa. It emerged from prehistoric Egypt around 3150BC (according to conventional Egyptian chronology), when Upper and Lower E ...

. It was the capital of the 13th or Heliopolite Nome of

Lower Egypt Lower Egypt ( ') is the northernmost region of Egypt, which consists of the fertile Nile Delta between Upper Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea, from El Aiyat, south of modern-day Cairo, and Dahshur. Historically, the Nile River split into sev ...

and a major religious centre. Its site is within the boundaries of Ain Shams and El Matareya, districts (''kism'') in northeastern

Cairo Cairo ( ; , ) is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Egypt and the Cairo Governorate, being home to more than 10 million people. It is also part of the List of urban agglomerations in Africa, largest urban agglomeration in Africa, L ...

. Heliopolis was one of the oldest cities of ancient Egypt, occupied since

prehistoric Egypt Prehistoric Egypt and Predynastic Egypt was the period of time starting at the first human settlement and ending at the First Dynasty of Egypt around 3100 BC. At the end of prehistory, "Predynastic Egypt" is traditionally defined as the period ...

.. It greatly expanded under the Old and Middle Kingdoms but is today mostly destroyed, its temples and other buildings having been scavenged for the construction of medieval Cairo. Most information about the ancient city comes from surviving records. A major surviving remnant of Heliopolis is the obelisk of the Temple of Ra- Atum erected by Senusret I of the Twelfth Dynasty. It remains in its original position (now in el-Masalla, El Matareya, Cairo). The high red granite obelisk weighs 120 tons (240,000 lbs) and is believed to be the oldest surviving obelisk in the world. Other obelisks, originating in Heliopolis, were taken by the Romans after their conquest of Egypt. The taller Vatican obelisk, was taken by Emporer Caligula, and now stands in St. Peter's Square, the only ancient obelisk in Rome never to have fallen. Emperor Augustus took the Obelisk of Montecitorio from Heliopolis to Rome, where it remains. Two smaller obelisks called Cleopatra's Needles, are now in London and New York, but were also originally from Heliopolis.

Names

Heliopolis is the Latinised form of the Greek name ''Hēlioúpolis'' (), meaning "City of the Sun". Helios, the personified and deified form of the sun, was identified by the Greeks with the native Egyptian gods Ra and Atum, whose principal cult was located in the city. Its native name was "The Pillars". The exact pronunciation is uncertain because ancient Egyptian recorded only consonantal values. Its traditional Egyptological transcription is ''Iunu'' but it appears as ''ʾOn'' () in Genesis 41:45 and 50 and ''ʾĀwen'' () in Ezekiel 30:17 and Amos 1:5 (apparently Baalbek). This later form would be the expected form in pausa, but perhaps is a play on ''awen'' "idolatry." Some scholars reconstruct its pronunciation in earlier Egyptian as ''*ʔa:wnu'', perhaps from older /ja:wunaw/. Variant transcriptions include ''Awnu'' and ''Annu''. The name survived as Coptic ''Ōn''. The city is called "House of Ra" in the Pyramid Texts, which date to the Old Kingdom of Egypt.

History

Ancient

Heliopolis was a regional center from

. It was principally notable as the cult center of the solar deity Atum, who came to be identified with Ra. and then with Horus as Ra-harakhty. The primary temple of the city was known as the "Great House" ( *''Par ʻĀʾat'') or "House of Atum" ( *''Par-ʼAtāma'', ). Its priests maintained that Atum or Ra was the first being, rising self-created from the primeval waters. A decline in the importance of Ra's cult during the Fifth Dynasty led to the development of the Ennead, a grouping of nine major Egyptian deities that placed the others in subordinate status to Ra–Atum. The High Priests of Ra are not as well documented as those of other deities, although the high priests of Dynasty VI (BC) have been discovered and excavated. During the Amarna Period of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Pharaoh Akhenaten introduced a kind of henotheistic worship of Aten, the deified solar disc. As part of his construction projects, he built a Heliopolitan temple named "Elevating Aten" ('), whose stones can still be seen in some of the gates of Cairo's medieval city wall. The cult of the Mnevis bull, another embodiment of the Sun, also had its altar here. The bulls' formal burial ground was situated north of the city. In the

Septuagint The Septuagint ( ), sometimes referred to as the Greek Old Testament or The Translation of the Seventy (), and abbreviated as LXX, is the earliest extant Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible from the original Biblical Hebrew. The full Greek ...

in Exodus 1:11, this city is mentioned as being one of the places that was rebuilt by enslaved

Hebrews The Hebrews (; ) were an ancient Semitic-speaking peoples, ancient Semitic-speaking people. Historians mostly consider the Hebrews as synonymous with the Israelites, with the term "Hebrew" denoting an Israelite from the nomadic era, which pre ...

. The store-city Pithom in the same passage is, according to one theory, Heliopolis. Today, it is generally believed that Pithom is the archaeological site of either Tell el-Retabeh or Tell el-Maschuta.

Hellenistic

Alexander the Great Alexander III of Macedon (; 20/21 July 356 BC – 10/11 June 323 BC), most commonly known as Alexander the Great, was a king of the Ancient Greece, ancient Greek kingdom of Macedonia (ancient kingdom), Macedon. He succeeded his father Philip ...

halted at this city on his march from Pelusium to Memphis. 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 Homer (; , ; possibly born ) was an Ancient Greece, Ancient Greek poet who is credited as the author of the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey'', two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Despite doubts about his autho ...

, Pythagoras,

Plato Plato ( ; Greek language, Greek: , ; born BC, died 348/347 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical Greece, Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of the writte ...

, 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 Greek rulers, the Ptolemies, probably took little interest in their "father" Ra as Greeks were never much of sun worshipers and the Ptolemies favored the cult of Serapis, and

Alexandria Alexandria ( ; ) is the List of cities and towns in Egypt#Largest cities, second largest city in Egypt and the List of coastal settlements of the Mediterranean Sea, largest city on the Mediterranean coast. It lies at the western edge of the Nile ...

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 first century BC, in fact, Strabo found the temples deserted, and the town itself almost uninhabited, although priests were still present. Heliopolis was well known to the ancient Greeks and Romans, being noted by most major geographers of the period, including

Ptolemy Claudius Ptolemy (; , ; ; – 160s/170s AD) was a Greco-Roman mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and music theorist who wrote about a dozen scientific treatises, three of which were important to later Byzantine science, Byzant ...

, Herodotus, and others, down to the

Byzantine The Byzantine Empire, also known as the Eastern Roman Empire, was the continuation of the Roman Empire centred on Constantinople during late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Having survived the events that caused the fall of the Western Roman E ...

geographer Stephanus of Byzantium.

Roman

Roman Egypt Roman Egypt was an imperial province of the Roman Empire from 30 BC to AD 642. The province encompassed most of modern-day Egypt except for the Sinai. It was bordered by the provinces of Crete and Cyrenaica to the west and Judaea, ...

, Heliopolis belonged to the province Augustamnica, causing it to appear as when it needed to be distinguished from Roman Heliopolis. Its population probably contained a considerable Arabian element. Many of the city's obelisks were removed to adorn more northern cities of the Delta and

Rome Rome (Italian language, Italian and , ) is the capital city and most populated (municipality) of Italy. It is also the administrative centre of the Lazio Regions of Italy, region and of the Metropolitan City of Rome. A special named with 2, ...

. Two of these eventually became

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

's Cleopatra's Needle and its twin in New York's Central Park. Cogniet Leon Bataille D Heliopolis

Islamic

During the Middle Ages, the growth of Fustat and

only a few kilometres away caused its ruins to be massively scavenged for building materials, including for their city walls. The site became known as the "Eye of the Sun" (''Ayn Shams'') and ''ʻArab al-Ḥiṣn''.

Legacy

The importance of the solar cult at Heliopolis is reflected in both ancient pagan and current monotheistic beliefs. Classical mythology held that the Egyptian bennu, renamed phoenix, brought the remains of its predecessor to the altar of the sun god at Heliopolis each time it was reborn. In the

Hebrew Bible The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach"
. '' Isaiah claimed the "City of the Sun" () would be one of the five Egyptian cities to follow the Lord of Heaven's army and speak

Hebrew Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...

Jeremiah Jeremiah ( – ), also called Jeremias, was one of the major prophets of the Hebrew Bible. According to Jewish tradition, Jeremiah authored the Book of Jeremiah, book that bears his name, the Books of Kings, and the Book of Lamentations, with t ...

and Ezekiel mention the House or Temple of the Sun () and Ôn, claiming Nebuchadnezzar II of the

Neo-Babylonian Empire The Neo-Babylonian Empire or Second Babylonian Empire, historically known as the Chaldean Empire, was the last polity ruled by monarchs native to ancient Mesopotamia. Beginning with the coronation of Nabopolassar as the King of Babylon in 626 BC a ...

would shatter its obelisks and burn its temple and that its "young men of Folly" (''Aven'') would "fall by the sword". The "Syrian Heliopolis" Baalbek has been claimed to have gained its solar cult from a priest colony emigrating from Egypt. The Titular Episcopal See of Heliopolis in Augustamnica remains a

titular see A titular see in various churches is an episcopal see of a former diocese that no longer functions, sometimes called a "dead diocese". The ordinary or hierarch of such a see may be styled a "titular metropolitan" (highest rank), "titular archbi ...

of both the

Catholic Church The Catholic Church (), also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the List of Christian denominations by number of members, largest Christian church, with 1.27 to 1.41 billion baptized Catholics Catholic Church by country, worldwid ...

and the

Eastern Orthodox Church The Eastern Orthodox Church, officially the Orthodox Catholic Church, and also called the Greek Orthodox Church or simply the Orthodox Church, is List of Christian denominations by number of members, one of the three major doctrinal and ...

Present site

The ancient city is currently located about below the streets of the middle- and lower-class suburbs of Al-Matariyyah, Ain Shams, and Tel Al-Hisn in northern

. The area is about west of the modern suburb which bears its name. Some ancient city walls of crude brick can be seen in the fields, a few granite blocks bearing the name of

Ramesses II Ramesses II (sometimes written Ramses or Rameses) (; , , ; ), commonly known as Ramesses the Great, was an Pharaoh, Egyptian pharaoh. He was the third ruler of the Nineteenth Dynasty of Egypt, Nineteenth Dynasty. Along with Thutmose III of th ...

remain, and the position of the great Temple of Ra-Atum is marked by the Al-Masalla obelisk. Archaeologists excavated some of its tombs in 2004.. In 2017, parts of a colossal statue of Psamtik I were found and excavated.

Gallery

A selection of old maps showing Heliopolis are below: File:Tabulam Hanc Chorographicam agri Ditionis de Grand Cairo comprehenso situ urbis memphiticae praenobili viro DD Gulielmo - Pococke Richard - 1743.jpg, 1743 map File:MemphisJamesRennell01.jpg, 1799 map File:1882 Maclure and Macdonald Bird's-Eye View Map of Cairo.jpg, 1882 map

Notes

References

Citations

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 * 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. * Reallexikon der Ägyptischen Religionsgeschichte - Hans Bonnet * * The Routledge Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses, George Hart * 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 *

External links

Obelisk of Psametik II from Heliopolis, removed and reerected by Augustus in Rome
{{DEFAULTSORT:Heliopolis (Ancient) Cities in ancient Egypt Roman sites in Egypt Archaeological sites in Egypt Former populated places in Egypt Hebrew Bible cities Nile Delta History of Cairo Tells (archaeology)