As an Egyptology student at the University of Heidelberg in the early s, Raue found his mind wandering as he toiled over a difficult early Middle Egyptian translation in the library. He recalls staring at the stacks surrounding him and his eye lighting on an enticing name: Heliopolis. The volume he saw was a report on early work conducted by Egyptian archaeologist Abdel-Aziz Saleh, who documented a small corner of the site in the s. Other accounts included that of an Italian team that worked in Heliopolis for a few years in the early s.
A report by pioneering British Egyptologist W. But when Raue searched for more information, he came up empty-handed. A few years later, the doctoral student was looking for a niche of his own in the crowded field of Egyptology.
On his way to work at the pyramids of Dahshur south of Cairo, he thought back to his experience in the library. Arriving in Egypt a few days early, he visited Heliopolis. To his surprise, one of the most important sites in ancient Egypt, with more than two millennia of history, lay virtually unexplored under what amounted to a suburban park.
Raue was tantalized. While working on a series of other sites in Egypt as part of German and Swiss projects there, Raue went to Heliopolis regularly, staying in touch with local archaeologists and keeping track of construction projects and development plans. Here and there, small windows of opportunity would open up. In , for example, Raue joined Egyptian colleagues excavating more than three acres of the ancient temple area ahead of planned shopping center construction in the middle of Matariya.
During the excavation, Raue helped document a life-size depiction of the pharaoh Ramesses II r. During the reign of Akhenaten r. Even after Akhenaten built his own city at Amarna, carvings on stone blocks called talatat , bearing his name and that of his queen, Nefertiti, were placed at Heliopolis. The continuity is amazing.
He spent many years working near Aswan, far to the south. Then came the Arab Spring of In the chaos that followed, Egyptian authorities lost control of the area, unleashing an unauthorized building boom.
At the same time, the center of the ancient temple site became an illegal trash dump. Raue estimates that thousands of tons of garbage—a stinking layer of construction debris, animal carcasses, and burned plastic from about 20 to a shocking 42 feet thick—accumulated on top of the site of the Temple of the Sun in the space of just two years.
For Raue and Aiman Ashmawy, the head of the archaeological sector at the Ministry of Antiquities, the chaos offered an opportunity.
In , even before the situation in Egypt had stabilized, they returned to Heliopolis and began an ambitious joint program of rescue excavations in the parts of Matariya threatened by illegal development, which is to say, almost the entire neighborhood.
The process sometimes resembles looking through keyholes to draw conclusions about the rooms behind. Before they did anything else, the team, together with a force of more than local residents and multiple bulldozers, spent weeks removing the garbage. Underneath the refuse, they confronted six, or sometimes more, feet of modern topsoil.
Another six to 10 feet of ancient loam packed almost as hard as concrete lay under that. Beneath it all, they came upon the debris left behind when Heliopolis was dismantled to serve as construction material.
During the excavations, pumping creates small lakes, which cause huge logistical problems and added pressure for a team already under enormous constraints. For example, it took a tremendous effort to remove an eight-ton fragment of a standing sculpture of pharaoh Psamtik I r. Today the only significant physical vestige of Heliopolis is a single remaining obelisk.
However, the legacy of Heliopolis is not yet defunct. Its ancient Greek name lives on as the moniker for a modern district of Cairo. Physical remains of Heliopolis are to be found overseas, with a high concentration in Rome. Some of the obelisks that were taken to Rome by the Roman emperors in antiquity were later acquired by the popes to adorn their own religious buildings; a massive Egyptian obelisk still stands in the center of the basilica at the Vatican, now adorned with a cross.
Much like the physical remains of Heliopolis, its ideological influence has passed beyond the borders of Egypt and lingers on today. Modern obelisks such as the Washington Monument can be seen in cities all over the world or adorning graveyards and religious buildings as symbols of eternity and resurrection, much as the Egyptians viewed them. Further, some Christians, disregarding the pagan origins of the phoenix, over the centuries adopted its iconography as symbolic of resurrection and even attempted to alter the biblical account of Jesus Christ to fit the myth.
The adaptation of such concepts has not ended with religious or religio-political syncretism. Plato himself is widely considered the most influential of all philosophers, an influence that is still exacted today. The legacy of concepts upheld at Heliopolis, whether directly or indirectly through the continuation of mythical concepts adhered to there, is still very much in evidence today.
There is yet another account to give of the city of On: the biblical account. From this perspective, the mythical status of the sun, as imagined in any divine form by humankind, is merely a counterfeit of the God of the Bible who created all things, including the physical sun John and Genesis — The question is whether such perspectives have valid origins and will have lasting value in the future.
As the Hebrew Scriptures attest time and again, false gods and idols were nothing at all compared to the true and living God of Israel. By the time of the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel, it was clear that the idolatry at On had no future. Commentators suggest that Ezekiel makes a play on the Hebrew word for Heliopolis at the time of Joseph, the city of On.
Judgment on the idolatry at On, as recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures, was enacted against the erroneous religious and cultural systems and those who upheld them. However, the plan that God had, and still has, for all human beings is one of tremendous future hope.
Finally, I arrived at the shop and miraculously found an empty parking slot right in front of it. Shop-owners take the inner side of the pavement to extend their shop spaces, while street vendors take the outer side of the pavement to display their goods. The passers-by are bombarded with flashy colors and huge signs from both sides. The historical and geographical evolution of Heliopolis renders the place far more interesting than it appears on the surface, adding depth and value to the corners you cross and to the shops you pass.
Heliopolis, or Masr El Gedida New Cairo , was originally built on the outskirts of Cairo in as an escape for the rich. He decided to build a palace and develop Heliopolis for her. Elites were looking for a new haven of serenity and elegance, so the construction and architecture of the palace, as the first building in Heliopolis, is top notch in order to match the taste and social status of the Belgian royal who owned it.
With the passing of time and expansion of Cairo, Heliopolis became a district within Cairo, and like many other places in Egypt, some areas in this once-elite neighborhood are deteriorating due to redistribution of the population and economic turbulence in Egypt. For example, Midan Al-Gamea came about with the building of a mosque that became the center of a huge market area.
In the beginning, aristocratic residential buildings increased as people moved from downtown to Heliopolis to build a new community, and shops opened to satisfy the demands of the residents. With time, the originally aristocratic area turned into a middle-class residence. Consequently, the number of shops and quality of the products decreased, making Midan Al-Gamea a chaotic yet refreshingly vibrant zone in Heliopolis.
Even still, Heliopolis remains one of the upper-class districts in Egypt, and the way passion, love and history are integrated into every construction here romanticizes the place and forces you to communicate with it as a spatial beauty rather than a blunt district in Cairo.
It is this elegance and sophisticated history that differentiates Heliopolis from other places in Cairo and Egypt.
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