the IVth Dynasty seem to have been the last true Memphites. At the end
of the reign of Shepseskaf, the last monarch of the dynasty, the sceptre
passed to a Heliopolitan family. The following VIth Dynasty may again
have been Memphite, but this is uncertain. The capital continued to be
Memphis, and from the beginning of the Hid Dynasty to the end of the Old
Kingdom and the rise of Herakle-opolis and Thebes, Memphis remained the
chief city of Egypt.

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-Râ 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-Râ, not Râ Harmachis, the rising sun,
whose emblem is the Great Sphinx at Gîza, 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