Position 31 - The Sole Survivor Of A Great City, The Obelisk Of Heliopolis

This granite shaft is the only considerable monument on this site to tell us that here once rose a magnificent temple in the heart of a great city. We might now repeat almost every word that we have used of Memphis; indeed, if we substitute the Mnevis bull for the Apis-bull in that description, it will apply exactly, except in the matter of the north and south limits of the city there given. It was the oldest great religious centre of ancient Egypt.

Here the priests of the sun-god had a sacred school from which went forth most of the religious compositions which later became authoritative. The temple was, during the Empire, second only to that of Amon at Thebes, in wealth and power. In Greek times it was still famous for the wisdom of its priesthood. Tradition states that Plato studied thirteen years here. The city itself was early destroyed, and Strabo, the geographer, found it in ruins in 60 B. C.; but his priestly guides pointed out to him the rooms of Plato and the Greek mathematician, Eudoxus.

But the sacred college in which they studied no longer existed. Heliopolis is the Greek name of the city; it was called On by the Egyptians and in this form it is mentioned a number of times in the Old Testament. You will remember especially how the Pharaoh gave to Joseph the daughter of a priest of On as his wife. That priest ministered under the shadow of this very obelisk, and it had already been standing several centuries at that time.

The city is also of interest because the obelisk now in New York once stood here with its fellow, which is now in London; for obelisks always stood in pairs at the entrance of a temple. They were erected to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary, not of a king's accession, but of his appointment as heir to the throne. On all four sides of this obelisk in a column of hieroglyphic beautifully cut down the middle, are recorded the full titles and names of King Sesostris I (Egyptian Senwosret, formerly pronounced Usertesen), with the added indication that the obelisk was erected on the occasion of the celebration of the king's thirty years' jubilee.

The temple before which this obelisk and its fellow (which stood until the 12th century) were erected, was built by Amenemhet I; and his son, Sesostris I, besides erecting these obelisks, made some additions to the temple. He left a record of these works in a building inscription, cut upon a large tablet, in one of the courts of this temple.

One day when this tablet had been standing some five hundred years, in the time of Amenophis II (18th Dynasty) a certain scribe seeing this fine example of the official prose current in the classic days of his 12th Dynasty ancestors, decided to make a practice copy of it. Seating himself before it, he produced a roll of leather, on which were some lumber bills and other memoranda duly dated in the third year of Amenophis II, and turning it over he copied the fine old building inscription on the back of his bills.

Sesostris I's great tablet, with its building inscription, perished centuries ago, but the scribe's hasty copy in rapid, running hand on the back of the lumber bills is now in the Berlin Museum, and thus a rare and fortunate accident has preserved for us Sesostris I's building inscription. In this record he makes a prophecy which has been remarkably fulfilled. He says: “My beauty shall be remembered in his (the sun-god's) house, My name is the pyramidion and my name is the lake.”

The “pyramidion” is the small pyramid which surmounts the obelisk, and the king means that his name shall be identified with the obelisk and the sacred temple lake, made by him, and thus immortalized. And strangely enough his obelisk, with its “pyramidion,” the only surviving monument of Heliopolis, has indeed preserved his name, and shall perpetuate it till the end of time, while all others here have perished.

It is sixty-six feet high, and is wrought from a single block of granite, quarried and worked at the first cataract and brought down the river on a huge barge. It probably weighs some three hundred tons. It and its now vanished comrade stood here in the very path of foreign invasion from Asia and Europe, and after weathering the storms of war, which raged around it for three thousand years, its comrade fell some seven hundred years ago, and was broken up and carried away by the Moslems.

But the survivor has seen the civilization of the western world gradually becoming dominant in the East, and bringing with it a reverence for these mute witnesses of a great past, which, we hope, will secure them an unlimited lease of life. In this spirit the Service des Antiquités has erected this protecting paling which you see around the obelisk, to hold at bay the native, the relic-hunter and all who may be minded to do it injury.

We here gain a good idea of the rich, level soil of the great Delta, although as we are looking south toward Cairo, the great portion of the Delta lies behind us, stretching away for nearly a hundred miles.

We have already intimated that Heliopolis lay on the route from Asia into Egypt. If you will look at the Map (No. 3) and trace the line of railway as it swings out from the Delta eastward, you will be able to follow that ancient route to the isthmus and the Suez Canal. Long before that railway was built, there was a canal along this line, connecting the Salt Lakes and the Nile, which is the same as to say the Red Sea and the Nile. We know that it was in existence in the days of Necho, before the Persians held Egypt, and it is probable that already in Ramses II's time (14th century B. C.), his engineers had completed this canal.

Before the construction of the canal, however, the route it later followed had been for ages a natural line of communication between Egypt and Asia; for there is here a valley, or wadi, as the Arabs say, known as the Wadi Tumilat, which, leaving the Delta, extends eastward to the isthmus, like a river of green through the desert, that bounds it on either hand. The district around the western end of this wadi was the land of Goshen, in which the Hebrews were given a home and pasturage for their flocks and herds; while near its eastern terminus was the city of Pithom, which they are said to have built.

You will remember that the Bible story states that they built for the Pharaoh the store-cities of Ramses and Pithom (Exodus 1: 11). The location of Ramses is unknown, but that of Pithom has been settled by the excavations of the Egypt Exploration Fund under Naville. It is the city of Pithom which we are now to visit. Find the red lines numbered 32 in the upper part of Map 3.

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