The discovery of the egyptian duat, temple of the sun and lost city of heliopolis in west africa

Another important feature of the Heaven or Duat of the Egyptians, where their gods lived, is the presence of a Staircase otherwise called “The Stairway to Heaven”. Zecharia Sitchen who dedicated a title of one of his books to this phenomenon, says that the Egyptian ‘Heaven’ was a physical place with a stairway or ladder leading into it. Quoting the Book of the Dead, Sitchen writes that when the stairway is reached, “the king is nearing the heart of the Duat; he is near the Amenta, the Hidden Place. It was there that Osiris himself had risen to the Eternal Afterlife. It was there that the ‘Two That Bring Closer the Heaven’ stood out… as ‘two magical trees.”⁴⁸ Quoting a prayer from the same passage in the Book of the Dead, Sitchen continues: “May be given to me my name in the House of Two; May in the House of Fire, my name be granted. In the night of computing years, and of telling the months, may I be a divine Being, may I sit at the east side of Heaven.”⁴⁹

All the features mentioned here (highlighted) are located in the Eastern Duat at the place where the mouth of the Duat is supposedly located. An all of them have parallels with the Dunu Oka shrine in Lejja. There is indeed a stairway, a sloping pathway constructed in a graded fashion with piles of iron slag that leads from a section of the forest into the Dunu Oka village square (plate 5).⁵⁰ The stairway is almost dilapidated, but we were able to clearly make out that this was a stairway and we said so to the villagers and fellow researchers on the mission, and everyone concurred.

The stairway is composed of four steps leading up to the central square, which is the heart and head of the entire structure. All the samples of the stairway we have so far seen in Egyptian texts are composed of four steps! The Egyptian Book of the Dead actually says that a stairway leading up to the ‘sky’ is located in Khemennu (Khe’nnu).⁵¹ Even the ‘sky’ is represented in Lejja in the form of a huge crescent-shaped pile of slag with the sun disk resting in front of it (plate 6).