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The Cult of Ra at Heliopolis

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The Cult of Ra at Heliopolis

Ra's principal cult center was Heliopolis, a city just north of modern Cairo whose ancient Egyptian name, Iunu, meant pillar, and whose priesthood developed one of the most influential theological systems in Egyptian religion, organizing Ra, Atum and the rest of the Ennead into the creation account later temples across Egypt drew upon. The city's most sacred structure was the Mansion of the Benben, a temple built around a pyramid shaped sacred stone believed to be the primeval mound on which the sun god first stood at creation, with a great obelisk raised in the temple courtyard as its architectural echo, a form Egyptian builders repeated at temples throughout the country as a solar symbol drawing on Heliopolis's own prototype. Almost nothing of ancient Heliopolis survives above ground today: beginning in the Late Period and accelerating under Roman and then Islamic rule, its temples were systematically quarried for building stone, much of it carried off to construct medieval Cairo, and its obelisks were removed one by one, first to Alexandria and later as far as Rome, Paris, London and New York, so that only a single obelisk, raised around 1950 BCE by Senusret the First, still stands on the original site. Heliopolis's priesthood nonetheless remained one of the most prestigious in Egypt for millennia, and its solar theology, developed specifically to explain and celebrate Ra, shaped how nearly every later Egyptian dynasty understood kingship and creation alike.

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Ra, Figures
Source The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient EgyptRichard H. Wilkinson
Sources
The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt
Richard H. Wilkinson, Thames & Hudson, 2003Heliopolis as Ra's cult center, the Mansion of the Benben, and the later quarrying of the siteView the Source
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