Ancient Heliopolis was the principal 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. He built a 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 in
Exodus 1:11, Heliopolis is mentioned as being one of the places that was rebuilt by enslaved
Hebrews. 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 halted at Heliopolis 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,
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 Greek rulers, the
Ptolemies, probably took little interest in their "father" Ra, as Greeks were never much of sun worshipers. The Ptolemies favored the cult of
Serapis, 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 first century BC,
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,
Herodotus, and others, down to the
Byzantine geographer
Stephanus of Byzantium.
Roman In
Roman Egypt, 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. Two of these eventually became
London's
Cleopatra's Needle and its twin in
New York's
Central Park. '' by
Léon Cogniet. The
Battle of Heliopolis took place during Napoleon's
invasion of Egypt in 1800
Islamic During the
Middle Ages, the expansion of nearby
Cairo and
Fustat drove a surge in demand for construction materials. Builders stripped the ruins of Heliopolis to supply stone for walls and structures in the rapidly growing cities. The site became known locally as the "Eye of the Sun" (
Arabic:
Ain Shams and
ʻArab al-Ḥiṣn). ==Legacy==