Heliopolis

“In ancient Egypt, Heliopolis was a regional center from predynastic times.

It was principally notable as the cult center of the sun god Atum, who came to be identified with Ra[12] and then Horus. The primary temple of the city was known as the Great House (Ancient Egyptian: Pr Ꜥꜣt or Per Aat, Par ʻĀʼat) or House of Atum (Pr I͗tmw or Per Atum, Par-ʼAtāma; Hebrew: פתם, Pithom). Its priests maintained that Atum or Ra was the first being, rising self-created from the primeval waters. A decline in the importance of Ra’s cult during Dynasty V led to the development of the Ennead, a grouping of nine major Egyptian deities that placed the others in subordinate status to Ra–Atum. The high priests of Ra are not as well documented as those of other deities, although the high priests of Dynasty VI (c. 2345 – c. 2181 BC) have been discovered and excavated.

During the Amarna Period of Dynasty XVIII, Pharaoh Akhenaten introduced a kind of henotheistic worship of Aten, the deified solar disc. As part of his construction projects, he built a Heliopolitan temple named “Elevating Aten” (Wṯs I͗tn or Wetjes Aten), whose stones can still be seen in some of the gates of Cairo’s medieval city wall. The cult of the Mnevis bull, another embodiment of the Sun, had its altar here as well. The bulls’ formal burial ground was situated north of the city.

The city is mentioned as being one of the places that was rebuilt by Hebrew slaves in the Greek Septuagint translation of the Bible (Exodus 1:11). The store-city Pithom in the same passage is, according to one theory, Heliopolis. Today, it is generally believed that Pithom is the archaeological site of either Tell el-Retabeh or Tell el-Maschuta.”