The shrine here was immensely wealthy. The staff of priests, officials, and subordinates connected with the temple is said to have numbered no less than 12,913. As the embodiment of the god Râ on earth, the king of the land naturally gave this shrine predominance, and increased its wealth by his gifts. This, added to the fact that the place had the honour of giving him a title (“Lord of On”) of which he, in his turn, was naturally proud, added greatly to the renown of the city. Besides the great temples, it is said to have been also “full of obelisks,” which were dedicated to the Sun-god in consequence of their being emblematic of his rays. “Cleopatra’s Needle” on the Embankment, the obelisk bearing the same name at Cairo, the Flaminian obelisk at Rome, and probably many others, all came from this city. According to Herodotus, the priests of Heliopolis or On were renowned above all others in Egypt for learning. The Hyksos who held rule in Egypt for so many centuries are regarded as having been wandering hordes of Bedouin Asiatics, called by the Egyptians “the impure,” though they also spoke of them under their name of Amu, regarded as being a word derived from the Semitic ’Am, from the root _’amam_, meaning “people.” How early they entered the country is not exactly known, but Petrie’s estimate, 2097 B.C., may be taken as the nearest at present possible. In connection with this it may be noted that, at the modern fishing-village of Sân, the present representative of the ancient Tanis, which was the city of the Hyksos kings described above, the faces and figures of the inhabitants are strange and unlike those of the remainder of Egypt. They call themselves Melakiyin, _i.e._ Melekites or “Royalists,” a name applied in the Christian period to a sect of the orthodox Church. They were anciently known as Pi-shemer, corrupted to Bashmurites, and also as Pi-Amu, corrupted to Biamites. There is, therefore, hardly any doubt that these people, the descendants of the wild and turbulent Bashmurites and Biamites who gave so much trouble to the khalifs Merwân II. (744-750) and Mamun (813-822), may claim for their ancestors either such of the followers of the Hyksos kings who, on the expulsion of the latter, decided to remain in the country, or else of those Semites whom the Hyksos found in Egypt when they conquered the country, and who helped them to consolidate their dominion, partly from sympathy and partly from interest.