The Heliopolitans were naturally the servants of the Sun-god above all other gods, and they were the first to call themselves “Sons of the Sun,” a title retained by the Pharaohs throughout all subsequent history.  It was Ne-user-Ra who built the Sun-temple of Abu Ghuraib, on the edge of the desert, north of his pyramid and those of his two immediate predecessors at Abusir.  As now laid bare by the excavations of 1900, it is seen to consist of an artificial mound, with a great court in front to the eastward.  On the mound was erected a truncated obelisk, the stone emblem of the Sun-god.  The worshippers in the court below looked towards the Sun’s stone erected upon its mound in the west, the quarter of the sun’s setting; for the Sun-god of Heliopolis was primarily the setting sun, Tum-Ra, not Ra Harmachis, the rising sun, whose emblem is the Great Sphinx at Giza, which looks towards the east.  The sacred emblem of the Heliopolitan Sun-god reminds us forcibly of the Semitic bethels or baetyli, the sacred stones of Palestine, and may give yet another hint of the Semitic origin of the Heliopolitan cult.  In the court of the temple is a huge circular altar of fine alabaster, several feet across, on which slain oxen were offered to the Sun, and behind this, at the eastern end of the court, are six great basins of the same stone, over which the beasts were slain, with drains running out of them by which their blood was carried away.  This temple is a most interesting monument of the civilization of the “Old Kingdom” at the time of the Vth Dynasty.

At Sakkara itself, which lies a short distance south of Abusir, no new royal tombs have, as has been said, been discovered of late years.  But a great deal of work has been done among the private mastaba-tombs by the officers of the Service des Antiquites, which reserves to itself the right of excavation here and at Dashur.  The mastaba of the sage and writer Kagernna (or rather Gemnika, “I-have-found-a-ghost,” which sounds very like an American Indian appellation) is very fine.  “I-have-found-a-ghost” lived in the reign of the king Tatkara Assa, the “Tancheres” of Manetho, and he wrote maxims like his great contemporary Phtahhetep ("Offered to Phtah"), who was also buried at Sakkara.  The officials of the Service des Antiquites who cleaned the tomb unluckily misread his name Ka-bi-n (an impossible form which could only mean, literally translated, “Ghost-soul-of” or “Ghost-soul-to-me"), and they have placed it in this form over the entrance to his tomb.  This mastaba, like those, already known, of Mereruka (sometimes misnamed “Mera”) and the famous Ti, both also at Sakkara, contains a large number of chambers, ornamented with reliefs.  In the vicinity M. Grebaut, then Director of the Service of Antiquities, discovered a very interesting Street of Tombs, a regular Via Sacra, with rows of tombs of the dignitaries of the VIth Dynasty on either side of it.  They are generally very much like one another; the workmanship of the reliefs is fine, and the portrait of the owner of the tomb is always in evidence.