A Greek grammarian of the first century AD named Apion of Alexandria made some quite remarkable statements about the life of Moses, the biblical lawgiver. In a quotation taken from his now lost work Aegyptiaca, fortunately preserved by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, he tells us:

I have heard of the ancient men of Egypt, that Moses was of Heliopolis, and that he thought himself obliged to follow the customs of his forefathers, and offered his prayers in the open air, towards the city walls: but that he reduced them all to be directed towards the sun-rising, which was agreeable to the situation of Heliopolis; that he also set up pillars instead of gnomons [obelisks?], under which was represented a cavity like that of a boat, and the shadow that fell from their tops fell down upon that cavity, that it might go round about the like course as the sun itself goes round in the other.¹

Apion was writing 1300 years after the Exodus out of Egypt, and yet it is clear that even in his own age the memory of Israel’s great religious reformer was still strong in the minds of the Egyptian people. Like Manetho before him, Apion goes on to state that this wise man ‘of Heliopolis’ united the ‘lepers’ and ‘impure people’ against the might of Egypt before being driven out of the country by the ruling Pharaoh.² And, like Manetho, Apion cites Moses as having championed a new style of sun-worship ‘agreeable’ to the age-old priesthood at Heliopolis.³

Where did this recurring theme that Moses had been a priest of Heliopolis actually come from? Why accredit this role to the biblical lawgiver who, until Sigmund Freud casually pointed out his obvious Egyptian background in the 1930s, was understood to have been born an Israelite of the house of Levi? In the knowledge that the character we know as Moses would appear to be integrally linked with the religious reforms instigated by Akhenaten at the commencement of the Amarna age, the association between Moses and the priests of Heliopolis becomes tantalisingly more apparent.

When Akhenaten succeeded to the throne of Egypt as Amen-hotep IV in around 1367 BC, he proclaimed himself to be First Prophet of his new faith of the Aten, and yet he did not refer to his omnipotent one-god under this name, not yet at least. For the first nine years of his reign it was known as Re-harakhty, Horus of the Horizon. This was a falcon-headed form of the sun-god Re that embodied the dual aspects of the double horizon – the solar disc in the west at sunset and in the east at sunrise. The centre for the cult of Re was the city of Heliopolis, in Lower Egypt. The Arabic name for Heliopolis is ‘Ain-Shams, literally the ‘sun eye’ or ‘spring of the sun’, while in the Bible it is referred to as On, a very close rendering of its original Egyptian name Aunu, ‘Ounû or Iwnw, the ‘pillared city’.⁴ It is a tide linked intrinsically with the towering obelisks that once stood in the forecourt of its ancient sun temples, the last remaining of which, erected during the reign of Senwosret I (Twelfth Dynasty, c. 1991–1962 BC), can be seen today amid the hustle and bustle of the el-Matariyah suburb of modern Cairo, close to the international airport.

Akhenaten championed the Heliopolitan cult of Re, adopting its religious ideals, its teachings, its priestly tides and its unique style of worship, which included, as Apion stated, open-air temples where the sun would be ceremonially welcomed at dawn each day⁵ In plain terms, the Heliopolitan doctrine became the principal Egyptian cult religion for the seventeen years of Akhenaten’s reign, for the brief three-year reign (two as co-regent) of his successor, Smenkhkare, and for the first three years of Tutankhamun’s reign (under the name Tutankhaten). Although any reference to Re-harakhty disappeared from royal inscriptions after Year Nine of Akhenaten’s reign, it is clear that behind the development and spread of the Aten faith was the extremely influential priesthood of Re. Somehow the priests were responsible for Akhenaten’s unprecedented departure from the traditional polytheistic worship, as well as his desire to dedicate his life to one single, all-encompassing deity. So strongly did he believe in this omnipotent, nameless god that he was prepared to change his name to honour its symbol, the sun-disc. It also made him relocate his entire capital city, forbid the worship of any other god and, as we shall see, alter the entire face of Egyptian civilisation. What could possibly have motivated him to make such drastic changes in a matter of a few short years?

KEEPERS OF THE SECRET

Heliopolis was a great centre of learning, a ‘university’ known throughout the ancient world. Greek writers and travellers would come to spend time with its learned priests, who were apparently versed in the ancient wisdom. Before the time of Alexander in the fourth century BC, the city was a magnificent sight with an enormous temple complex, complete with administrative buildings, schools of learning and open courts all surrounded by an almighty double wall 13 metres in width and 9 metres in height. Heliopolis is its Greek name and means, quite literally, the ‘city of the sun’ – a reference to its priesthood’s much-celebrated cult of the sun-god Re, which evolved from the more ancient cult of the god Atum, who was known as the Great One of Perfection. It was not until the advent of the pyramid age, c. 2678 BC, that the cult of Re overtook Atum in popularity at Heliopolis, almost certainly because of its royal patronage during Old Kingdom times. Yet the history of Heliopolis goes back way beyond the age of the Pharaohs to a time when Egyptian religious texts tell us that the enigmatic Shemsu-hor, the Followers of Horus, ruled as priest-kings from this ancient seat of power.⁶

The ancient heritage and wisdom of the Heliopolitan priesthood were renowned. Herodotus, the famous Greek historian of the fifth century BC, visited Heliopolis and subsequently recorded that in his opinion its priests had ‘the reputation of being the best skilled in history of all the Egyptians’.⁷ Not only were they versed in geometry, medicine, mythology and philosophy, but they were also looked on as ‘masters of astronomy’.⁸ Herodotus alludes to this in his History by stating that the priests of Heliopolis, along with those of Memphis and Thebes, ‘were the first to discover the solar year, and to portion out its course into 12 parts [i.e. the 12-fold division of the ecliptic and the 12 lunar months, each of 30 days]’⁹ – knowledge, he said, they obtained ‘from the stars’.¹⁰ The priests also informed him that the Egyptians were the first to use the ‘names of the 12 gods, which the Greeks adopted from them’ and the first to erect ‘altars, images and temples to the gods’ and that ‘in most cases they proved to me that what they said was true’.¹¹

So revered were Heliopolis’ ancient libraries that a Thirteenth-Dynasty Pharaoh named Khasekhemre-Neferhotep, c. 1750 BC, left for posterity a stone stela at Abydos on which he recorded how he had ‘desired to see the ancient writings of Atum’ so that he might know ‘how he was created, and how the gods were fashioned, and so that I may know the god [Osiris Khenti] in his [true] form, and may make [a statue of] him as he was of old, at the time when they [the gods] made the images [of themselves] at their council for the purpose of establishing their monuments on earth’. The inscription goes on to state that the king accepted an invitation from the priests, the ‘keepers of all the secret [books]’, to visit the libraries of Atum at Heliopolis, where he was able to view likenesses of Osiris Khenti that enabled his craftsmen to make a statue of his ‘ancestor’, whom he firmly believed was buried like a mortal man in a royal cemetery within Abydos’ western necropolis.¹²

The age-old libraries of Heliopolis contained many ancient books hoary with age even in Khasekhemre-Neferhotep’s day. It was from these that Manetho, who was himself a priest there, undoubtedly obtained much of the material that appeared subsequently in both his king-lists and his now lost three-volume history of Egypt.¹³

Other writers who are known to have consulted the libraries at Heliopolis include Pythagoras, Thales, Democritus and Eudoxus.¹⁴ Plato (429–347 BC), the noted Greek philosopher and author of various literary works of great importance, wrote that the priests of Egypt (perhaps those at Heliopolis) had observed the stars ‘for 10,000 years or, so to speak, for an infinite time’.¹⁵

That the priests of Heliopolis were ‘masters of astronomy’ is impossible to deny. The holy of holies deep inside the temple complex was known as the ‘Star Room’,¹⁶ while its high priest bore the tide ‘Chief of the Astronomers’. Apparently, he wore a robe adorned with stars and carried as an emblem of office a long staff which terminated in a five-pointed star.¹⁷

The Heliopolitan brotherhood did not, however, confine its astronomical interests simply to noting the positions and courses of the stars. It would also seem that, as Plato suggested, they used the heavenly bodies to monitor the passage of time. This is strongly indicated by the role once played by Heliopolis’ needle-like obelisks, for as the fourteenth-century Arab chronicler al-Makrizi noted:

’Ain-Shams is the temple of the Sun at Heliopolis where there stand two columns so marvellous that one has never seen anything more beautiful. . . They are about 50 cubits high . . . The points of their summits are made of copper . . . At the moment when the Sun enters the First Point of Capricorn, that is to say on the shortest day of the year, it reaches the southernmost of the two obelisks and crowns its summit; and when it reaches the First Point of Cancer, that is to say on the longest day of the year, it touches the northernmost obelisk and crowns its summit. These two obelisks thus form the two extreme points of the solar swing and the equinoctial line passes between them . . ,¹⁸

This ancient tradition, recorded by Makrizi long after Heliopolis had fallen into ruin, seems to echo the opinion of Apion, who spoke of the rebel priest and religious reformer named Moses as having ‘set up pillars instead of gnomons’ so that their shadow ‘might go round about the like course as the sun itself goes round’. It seems certain that at least some of the obelisks of Heliopolis were set up to mark the course of the sun as it shifted gradually back and forth from solstice to solstice via the two equinoctial days. The necessity of such precision knowledge was to monitor the movements of the stars as they slowly altered their positions against the backdrop of the celestial horizon.

HORUS OF THE HORIZON

Although few scholars would deny that Akhenaten hijacked the Heliopolitan cult of Re to initiate his own religious revolution, to understand how this came about will necessitate going back in history nearly 50 years to the reign of his grandfather, Thutmose IV (c. 1413–1405 BC), for it was this king who began elevating the sun-god to the role of supreme deity for the very first time.

It is said that when Thutmose was no more than a prince, something very strange happened when he was out hunting one day. Having become weary, he fell asleep against the towering head of the Great Sphinx. In a dream its spirit addressed the young prince, telling him that if he were to clear away the sand that clogged its body, then he would become king of Egypt. The Sphinx remained true to its word, for after carrying out its request, the prince of Egypt, perhaps inevitably, ascended the throne to become Thutmose IV. Both the dream and its fulfilment are commemorated in an important inscription carved on a red-granite stela, erected by Thutmose during his reign and found today between the outstretched paws of the leonine monument.¹⁹

Whatever the reality of Thutmose’s prophetic dream, it affirms two things: first, that the king would appear to have patronised the Heliopolitan cult of Re, and, secondly, that its priesthood would appear to have supported him. The key to Thutmose’s devotion to the sun cult of Re is the Great Sphinx, for although the principal form of Re-harakhty, Horakhty or Horus of the Horizon was the falcon-headed god (the manner in which he was depicted in the earliest temples built by Akhenaten at Karnak), the name would also appear to be linked to the Great Sphinx. The Sphinx, or Dream, Stela as it is popularly known, names the genius loci of the leonine monument as Har-em-akhet-Khepri-Re-Atum. Re and Atum we have already encountered. Khepri is the sun-god in the form of the dung beetle, while Har-em-akhet, ‘Horus-in-the-Horizon’, is essentially another form of Re-harakhty.²⁰ The granite stela also tells us that Thutmose IV was the protector of Harakhty, ‘living image of the All-lord’, seemingly a reference to the Sphinx itself.²¹ For, as the eminent Egyptologist Sir E.A. Wallis Budge was to note:

The largest known monument or figure of Heru-khuti [i.e. Horakhty, or Re-harakhty] is the famous Sphinx, near the Pyramids of Gizeh, which was his type and symbol.²²

As we have already seen, the Great Sphinx stands as sentinel guardian close to the south-eastern corner of the Giza plateau, just 22.5 kilometres (14 miles) south-west of the old religious centre at Heliopolis. Ever since Old Kingdom times, when the various pyramid fields were being constructed, Giza, or Rostau as it was known in Egyptian, came under the jurisdiction of the Heliopolitan priesthood. To them it was a necropolis of the dead and featured heavily in their mythological doctrine of the underworld (see Chapter Twelve). The fulfilment of Thutmose’s revelatory dream, along with his erection of the Sphinx Stela following the clearance of sand from around the body of the Sphinx, is to be seen therefore as an attempt by the king to affirm some kind of mutual alliance not just with the priests of Re at nearby Heliopolis but also with their god Re-harakhty, Horus of the Horizon.

Thutmose’s royal patronage of the Heliopolitan doctrine was unprecedented in New Kingdom times. All previous kings of the Eighteenth Dynasty, which had begun with the expulsion of the Hyksos in around 1575 BC, had honoured the god Amun, whose powerful priesthood controlled state affairs and rites of kingship from their cult centre at Thebes (modern-day Karnak in southern Egypt). No one can deny this powerful connection between Thutmose IV and Heliopolis, for he also took the unprecedented step of erecting a single obelisk that honoured Re-harakhty on the east-west axis line of Karnak’s Temple of Amun.²³ That Thutmose was beginning to revere the Heliopolitan sun-disc over and above any other deity is proved by the discovery of a huge stone scarab beetle issued during his reign. Its inscription refers to the Aten as the god of battles who ‘makes pharaoh mighty in his dominions’ and brings all his subjects under its sway.²⁴

Thutmose IV’s son, Amenhotep III (c. 1405–1367 BC), Akhenat-en’s father, continued this renewed royal patronage of the Heliopolitan cult of the sun, under the influence of which he began to change the whole emphasis of Egyptian religion. Pushing further than his father before him, Amenhotep became the first king to elevate the Aten sun-disc into a divinity with its own temples and priesthood.²⁵ He also named his royal barge Aten Gleams, or the ‘radiance of Aten’,²⁶ and even adopted the name Akhenaten, ‘spirit of Aten’, as a praenomen.²⁷

There was nothing unusual about kings placating and venerating one particular cult centre or deity over and above another, and so the fact that both Thutmose IV and his son Amenhotep III developed an open affinity with the gods of Heliopolis should not be seen as strange, simply a case of personal preference. Yet when Akhenaten took the throne of Egypt after his father, Amenhotep III, he did not simply patronise the temples at Heliopolis and promote their solar faith; he became utterly obsessed with their doctrines over and above every other cult. Not only did both Re and Re-harakhty merge to become important aspects of the Aten, but Akhenaten also cast aside his own rules in forbidding the use of animalistic symbols so that he could depict himself as a human-headed sphinx.

It is in this manner that Akhenaten is portrayed in a little-known wall relief in the possession of the Kestner Museum at Hanover in Germany. Here the king is shown in a scene typical of the Amarna style of art as a human-headed sphinx making offerings to the multi-rayed Aten sun-disc. Its existence, when seen alongside his utter devotion to Re-harakhty, hints at the possibility that, like his grandfather Thutmose IV before him, Akhenaten possessed a special interest in the Sphinx monument of Giza. What might this have been? What could he have possibly learned from the priests of Heliopolis concerning the leonine monument’s hidden mysteries? Only by understanding the depth at which Akhenaten adopted the Heliopolitan doctrines can we even begin to contemplate these questions.

Animal worship and the adoration of idols were, as we have seen, forbidden by Akhenaten and yet, in addition to depicting himself as a human-headed sphinx, he also revered the sacred Mnevis bull of Heliopolis, which was seen as an incarnation of the god Ur-mer, described in ancient texts as the ‘life of Ra’²⁸ Each bull would be afforded a life of luxury by its presiding priests, and after its natural death the carcass would be mummified and interred in a specially prepared tomb at Heliopolis. Yet after his move to Amarna, Akhenaten is known to have commissioned the construction of a grand tomb in the so-called Royal Wadi – where he also constructed a tomb for himself- which was intended to house the mummified remains of the current Mnevis bull when it died.²⁹ It is uncertain whether the tomb was ever used for this purpose, although its mere existence once again affirms Akhenaten’s great reverence for the Heliopolitan religion.

MANSIONS OF THE BENBEN

More significant was Akhenaten’s veneration of what was perhaps the most important element of the Heliopolitan sun-cult: the so-called benben (bnbn). This was a sacred stone shaped like a cone, a pyramid or a stepped object, which had been mounted on a stone perch located in an open court adjoining a temple at Heliopolis known as the Mansion of the Benben or the Mansion of the Phoenix.

In Year Four of his reign, Akhenaten initiated the construction of a huge temple at Karnak, Thebe’s religious centre, called, in similarity to its counterpart at Heliopolis, the Mansion of the Benben. As with its ‘mother’ temple, Akhenaten is likely to have set up a huge sandstone representation of the benben-stonc in its vast open-air court. In addition to this, following his relocation to what is today Tell el-Amarna in Middle Egypt in Year Six, he set about building within the confines of his new city another huge open-air temple called the Great House of the Aten. This, too, included at its eastern end, closest to the morning sunrise, a Mansion of the Benben which is known to have housed a benben-stonc. This sacred pillar took the form of a round-topped stela of quartzite, surmounted on a stone dais.³⁰ Akhenaten even erected a stylised stela with the appearance of a round-topped benben-stone at Heliopolis, where his father had already built a temple to the Aten during his own reign.³¹ On this stone Akhenaten and his family were shown prostrating themselves before the sun-disc.³²

The origin of this strange practice is obscure. It has been theorised that the original benben-stone might have been composed of meteoric iron, a precious substance highly revered by the Ancient Egyptians and connected by them with the worship of the stars.³³ This supposition, advanced by a number of authors, is, however, still a matter of conjecture, for the texts are silent on the matter. Furthermore, the original benben-stone had disappeared long before the pyramid age, and plausibly even before the advent of dynastic Egypt. No one can be sure what it might have been, although it is generally accepted that the priests of Heliopolis replaced the original item with a conical-shaped stone surmounted on a needle-like pillar, which may well have been the prototype for the much later obelisks so familiar to Egyptian architecture.

Akhenaten’s apparent obsession with benben-stones almost certainly explains the curious statement made by Apion of Alexandria, who spoke of Moses, the religious reformer ‘of Heliopolis’, erecting ‘pillars instead of gnomons’. The word ‘gnomons’ is a reference to needle-like obelisks, while the word ‘pillars’ seems to imply something else, very likely the round-topped dais stones thought to have been erected by Akhenaten at Karnak, at his new city in Amarna and at Heliopolis. The fact that Apion also refers to this Moses offering ‘his prayers in the open air, towards the city walls’ and directing everyone that they should worship ‘towards the sun-rising’ in a manner ‘agreeable to the situation of Heliopolis’³⁴ points to one clear conclusion. It is that Apion was preserving some kind of distorted memory, still prevalent in Egypt during the first century BC, concerning the religious changes implemented during the reign of Akhenaten under the influence of the Heliopolitan priesthood.

THE DIVINE SOULS

How might we explain Akhenaten’s strange fascination with the benben-stone? What did it mean to him, and why did he feel it necessary to place within the heart of his temple complexes cult objects that could easily have been construed as idolatrous fetish stones? As Egyptologist Donald Redford felt obliged to comment on this subject:

That Amenophis IV should, in the light of his well-attested aversion to polytheistic symbolism in mythology, have permitted this icon to a naive account of creation to find a prominent place in his thinking, is strange to say the least. Obviously the bnbn did not conjure up for the king the objectionable connections with mythology that we might have expected.³⁵

To understand Akhenaten’s reverence of the benben-stone we must look at exactly what this cult object meant to the Ancient Egyptians. In very basic terms it was the crystallisation of the primeval mound, or hill – the first solid ground that emerged from the primeval ocean in the darkness that preceded the light of the first morning. It was a representation of the djed-pillar, or perch, on which the primeval god Atum, a role adopted later by Re, was able to effect acts of creation in the world.³⁶ A more detailed description of the benben-stone is given in the Pyramid Texts, found inscribed on the tomb walls of various Fifth- and Sixth-Dynasty pyramids, such as the Pyramid of Unas (c. 2370–2340 BC) at Saqqara. This extraordinary collection of cosmo-logical writings and magical spells constitutes what is perhaps the oldest body of magical-religious material anywhere in the world. More significantly, Egyptian language scholar R.T. Rundle Clark concluded that they were composed ‘in the main’ by the astronomer-priests of Heliopolis.³⁷ Their repeated references to the solar cult of Atum-Re and Annu (Heliopolis), as well as their direct connection with the kings and pyramids of Old Kingdom times, all point clearly towards a Heliopolitan origin for this material.

The original benben-stone positioned on a stone pillar in the court adjoining the Mansion of the Benben at Heliopolis was in effect a marker that symbolised the Point of First Creation, the place of sep tepi, the First Time, where the initial group of nine netjeru gods, known in Heliopolitan tradition as the Great Ennead, made their entry into the world. In time, these divine beings were followed by a second group of nine gods known as the Lesser Ennead, who were in turn followed by a third and final group of nine variable gods. Finally, these were replaced by a further group of ‘mythical’ individuals known in the Pyramid Texts as the Divine Souls.³⁸

Egyptologist Abdel-Aziz Saleh recorded in his definitive work Excavations at Heliopolis that the Divine Souls are to be equated with the Shemsu-hor, who he described as ‘the pre-dynastic lords, or monarchs, of the city’.³⁹ These demi-gods were, he wrote, viewed by the priests of Heliopolis as the true founders of its first physical temple, known as the Mansion of the Princes or the Mansion of the Nobles.⁴⁰ Indeed, the priesthood would seem to have been convinced that the Divine Souls had ruled from Heliopolis and its environs during a golden age prior to the coming of the mortal Horus-kings.⁴¹

To these astronomer-priests of great wisdom and understanding, such concepts were not simply myths; they were a tangible reality conveyed in poetic terms within their cosmological doctrine. To them Heliopolis really was the home of the gods, who really had built the first temples both here and at nearby Giza.

Our knowledge of the Giza plateau’s immense antiquity, along with its astronomical alignments and high technology, points clearly towards the fact that the astronomer-priests of Heliopolis were somehow preserving the memory of the Sphinx-building Elder culture, who reigned supreme in Egypt during the First Time, the age of the lion, which had passed many thousands of years before the ascension of the first Pharaoh. It seems plausible that if anyone inherited the advanced technology of the Elder gods, then it was the priesthood of Re at Heliopolis. Could the knowledge of sonic levitation and ultrasound drilling have passed into their sphere of influence at the beginning of dynastic history? If so, were they behind its use during the pyramid age, and did they in turn convey at least some semblance of this sound technology to Akhenaten?

Before answering these pressing questions, it will be necessary to understand the manner in which the arcane myths surrounding the golden age of the gods influenced the establishment of Egypt’s royal dynasties and religious cults from the time of the pyramid builders to the ascent of Akhenaten. Only then will a much clearer picture begin to emerge.