The map is not background. It is the mechanism.

Greek Heliopolis / now Cairo, under the suburb of Ain Shams

Old Kingdom, and enormously influential long after

The intellectual centre of solar religion and the home of the Ennead, the creation account that became the standard one. Its priesthood shaped the Pyr...

Ra · Atum · Shu

Greek Bubastis / now Tell Basta, near Zagazig

Twenty-second Dynasty, when its rulers governed Egypt

The city of Bastet. Herodotus describes its annual festival as the largest and most exuberant in Egypt, with hundreds of thousands travelling by boat,...

Bastet

Greek Memphis / now Mit Rahina, south of Cairo

Old Kingdom capital, and an administrative centre for three thousand years

The capital of unified Egypt for most of the Old Kingdom, and the home of Ptah, the creator who thinks and speaks the world. Its name, from the pyrami...

Ptah · Sekhmet · Nefertem

now Saqqara

Old Kingdom, and in use for over three thousand years

The burial ground of Memphis, holding the Step Pyramid of Djoser, the first large stone building in the world, designed by Imhotep. The Pyramid Texts ...

Sokar · Anubis · Imhotep

Greek Hermopolis Magna / now El-Ashmunein

New Kingdom and later

The city of Thoth and of the Ogdoad, the eight gods standing for the qualities of the water before creation. Its Egyptian name simply means 'eight tow...

Thoth · Amun

now Tell el-Amarna

Roughly seventeen years in the mid-fourteenth century BCE

Built from nothing on virgin ground by Akhenaten as the capital of a state devoted to the Aten alone, and abandoned almost immediately after his death...

The Aten

Greek Thebes / now Luxor

New Kingdom

The religious capital of the empire. Karnak grew for more than a millennium into the largest religious structure ever built, and the wealth of Amun's ...

Amun · Mut · Khonsu

Greek Abydos / now El-Araba el-Madfuna

Middle Kingdom onward

The burial place of Egypt's first kings and, from the Middle Kingdom, the reputed tomb of Osiris and the greatest pilgrimage site in the country. Egyp...

Osiris · Isis · Wepwawet

Greek Tentyris / now Dendera

Ptolemaic and Roman, though the cult is far older

The great temple of Hathor, and the site of the New Year festival in which her statue was carried to the roof to be united with the sun's rays. The De...

Hathor · Isis · Horus

Greek Apollinopolis Magna / now Edfu

Ptolemaic

The temple of Horus of Behdet, built over about 180 years from 237 BCE. Its walls carry the Triumph of Horus, a ritual drama of the god putting down r...

Horus · Hathor

Greek Philae / now Agilkia Island, Aswan

Ptolemaic and Roman

The last working temple of the old religion. The final dated hieroglyphic inscription was carved here in 394 CE and the last demotic one in 452 CE, lo...

Isis · Hathor · Osiris

Greek Elephantine / now Aswan

Old Kingdom onward, as a frontier

The island at the first cataract, Egypt's southern border and the point where the inundation was believed to be released from caverns below. It was al...

Khnum