Page 349 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Chapter 41

City of the Sun, Chamber of the Jackal

Mohamed picked us up at our hotel in Heliopolis at 6 a. m. when it was
still half dark.
We drank small cups of thick black coffee at a roadside stall and then
drove west, along dusty streets still almost deserted, towards the River
Nile. I had asked Mohamed to take us through Maydan al-Massallah
Square, which was dominated by one of the world’s oldest intact Egyptian
obelisks. Weighing an estimated 350 tons, this was a pink granite
1
monolith, 107 feet high, erected by Pharaoh Senuseret I (1971-1928 BC).
It had originally been one of a pair at the gateway of the great
Heliopolitan Temple of the Sun. In the 4000 years since then the temple
itself had entirely vanished, as had the second obelisk. Indeed, almost all
of ancient Heliopolis had now been obliterated, cannibalized for its
handsome dressed stones and ready-made building materials by
countless generations of the citizens of Cairo.
2
Heliopolis (City of the Sun) was referred to in the Bible as On but was
originally known in the Egyptian language as Innu, or Innu Mehret—
meaning ‘the pillar’ or ‘the northern pillar’. It was a district of immense
3
sanctity, associated with a strange group of nine solar and stellar deities,
and was old beyond reckoning when Senuseret chose it as the site for his
obelisk. Indeed, together with Giza (and the distant southern city of
Abydos) Innu/Heliopolis was believed to have been part of the first land
that emerged from the primeval waters at the moment of creation, the
land of the ‘First Time’, where the gods had commenced their rule on
earth.
4
Heliopolitan theology rested on a creation-myth distinguished by a
number of unique and curious features. It taught that in the beginning
the universe had been filled with a dark, watery nothingness, called the
Nun. Out of this inert cosmic ocean (described as ‘shapeless, black with
the blackness of the blackest night’) rose a mound of dry land on which
Ra, the Sun God, materialized in his self-created form as Atum
(sometimes depicted as an old bearded man leaning on a staff):
5

1 ‘Saqqara, Egypt: Archaeologists have discovered a green limestone obelisk, the world’s
oldest-known complete obelisk, dedicated to Inty, a wife of Pharaoh Pepi I, Egypt’s ruler
almost 4300 years ago, who was regarded as a goddess after her death.’ Times, London,
9 May 1992; see also Daily Telegraph, London, 9 May 1992.
2 Atlas of Ancient Egypt, pp. 173-4; Rosalie and Anthony E. David, A Biographical
Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, Seaby, London, 1992, pp. 133-4; Blue Guide, Egypt, p. 413.
The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, p. 110.
3
4 George Hart, Egyptian Myths, British Museum Publications, 1990, p. 11.
5 The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, p. 110; Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 66;

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