The site of Heliopolis is well-known to every tourist who has been to Cairo. The drive to the garden and ostrich-farm of Matarîyeh and the obelisk of Usertesen I. is a pleasant way of filling up an afternoon. But of the ancient city of Heliopolis or On, with its famous temple of Ra, the Sun-god, its university of learned priests, and its innumerable monuments of the past, there is little now to be seen. The obelisk reared in front of its temple a thousand years before Joseph married the daughter of its high-priest still stands where it stood in his day; but the temple has vanished utterly. So, too, has the sister obelisk which was erected by its side, and of which Arabic historians still have something to say. Nothing is left but the mud-brick wall of the sacred enclosure, and a thick layer of lime-stone chippings which tell how the last relics of the temple of the Sun-god were burnt into lime for the Cairo of Ismail Pasha. One or two fragments were rescued from destruction by Dr. Grant Bey, the most noticeable of which is a portion of a cornice, originally 30 feet 4 inches in length, which had been erected by Nektanebo II., the last of the native Pharaohs. Blocks with the names of the second and third Ramses are also lying near the western gate of the enclosure, and in the eastern desert are the tombs of the dead. Nothing more remains of the old capital of Egyptian religion and learning. The destruction is indeed complete; the spoiler whom Jeremiah saw in prophetic vision has broken “the images of Beth-Shemesh,” and burnt with fire “the houses of the gods of the Egyptians.” If we would see the obelisks and images of On we must now go to the cities and museums of Europe or America. It was from Heliopolis that the huge scarab of stone now in the British Museum was originally brought to Alexandria, and at Heliopolis Cleopatra’s Needle was first set up by Thothmes III. in front of the temple of Amon. Heliopolis was the centre and source of the worship of the Sun-god in ancient Egypt, in so far, at all events, as he was adored under the name of Ra. The worship goes back to prehistoric days. Menes was already a “son of Ra,” inheriting his right to rule from the Sun-god of On. The theology of Heliopolis is incorporated in the earliest chapters of the Book of the Dead, that Ritual of the Departed, a knowledge of which ensured the safe passage of the dead man into the world to come. It was in the great hall of its first temple that Egyptian mythology believed Horus to have been cured of his wounds after the battle with Set. The origin of the temple, in fact, like the origin of the school of priests which gathered round it, was too far lost in the mists of antiquity for authentic history to remember.