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

The entry on Ancient Egyptian Heliopolis says its Egyptian vernacular name also meant “Place of Pillars”. We took special notice of the fact that almost every single slag at the Dunu Oka Shrine in Lejja is shaped like a pillar (Plate 8)! This gave the immediate impression of a broken down fortress.⁶⁵ We checked into this phenomenon in Sumerian records and got the information that by ca. 2900 B.C. Gilgamesh, the Sumerian king of the city of Uruk made a hazardous trip to the abode of the gods of Sumer, where Utu was lord: “House of Darkness, the abode below the ground…the Land of the Living, the place whereto the gods had taken those humans who were granted eternal youth.”⁶⁶ Sitchen wrote that like Alexander the Great and Homer’s Ulysses, who made the same trip thousands of years later, Gilgamesh had to enter into the territory of the sun-god. He was told the land lay in the joint territory of Adad and Utu/Shamash.⁶⁷ There he entered tried unsuccessfully to access “a tunnel … hidden by trees and bushes and blocked by soil and rock”.⁶⁸ In two separate instances, Sitchen points out that the gateway to heaven is a “Place of pillars” ⁶⁹ (plate 9). It does appear from these descriptions that the Oshuru celestial disk (mound) which covers the opening called “the mouth of the earth” was once surrounded by pillars when the place was still accessible to the outside world. The pillars must have been later broken up and piled into heaps forming the recognizable symbols which Egyptians associated with ‘Heaven’. This must have been the original the idea of “a fortified circle”. There is no other logical reason to pack slag into pillars or cylindrical shapes, except to create a fortress. This was perhaps the original shape of the ‘Gate of Heaven’ in the heydays of Lejja.

Plate 8: (Left) Broken Pillars of prehistoric slag at the Lejja Shrine of Heliopolis (photo by C. Acholobu). Plate 9a: (Right) An image of the Benben hidden behind pillars in Heliopolis, from Andrew Collins, Beneath the Pyramids, p. 55.

Plate 9b: Another image associated with the Duat in Egypt clearly showing pillars surrounding a mound like the