Associated with the cities with east and west walls and these pyramids are temples facing due east, fit, therefore, to receive the rays from a star on the equator or of the morning sun rising at an equinox.
According to Professor Flinders Petrie, at the pyramid of Mêdûm there is a small temple open to the west on the east side of the pyramid. At sunset at the equinox the sepulchral chamber and the sun were in line from the adytum. The priest faced a double Osiris.
Other pyramids were built at Sakkarah during the sixth dynasty, but it is remarkable that such a king as Pepi-Meri-Rā should not have imitated the majestic structures of the fourth dynasty. He is said to have built a pyramid at Sakkarah, but its obscurity is evidence that the pyramid idea was giving way, and it looks as if this dynasty were really on the side of the southern cult, for the authority of Memphis declined, and Abydos was preferred, while abroad Sinai was reconquered, and Ethiopia was kept in order.[108]
The sphinx (oriented true east) may possibly be ascribed to the earliest pyramid builders; it could only have been sculptured by a race with an equinoctial cult.
The Buildings of the Eleventh and Twelfth Dynasties.
We have next to consider what happened after the great gap in Egyptian history between the sixth and twelfth dynasties, 3500 B.C.—2851 B.C. (Mariette); from Nitocris to Amenemhāt I. We pass to the Middle Empire, and here we have merely to deal with the worships previously referred to in Northern Egypt.
Amenemhāt I. built no pyramids, he added no embellishments to Memphis; but he took Annu under his care, and now we first hear of Thebes.[109]
Usertsen I. built no pyramids, he added no embellishments to Memphis, but he also took Annu under his care, and added obelisks to the temples, one of which remains to this day. Further, he restored the temple of Osiris at Abydos, and added to the temple of Amen-Rā at Thebes.[110]
Surely it is very noteworthy that the first thing the kings of the twelfth dynasty did was to look after the only three temples in Egypt of which traces exist, which I have shown to have been oriented to the Sun not at an equinox. It is right, however, to remark that there seems to have been a mild recrudescence of pyramid building towards the end of the twelfth dynasty, and immediately preceding the Hyksos period, whether as a precursor of that period or not.
Usertsen's views about his last home have come down to us in a writing by his scribe Mirri:—[111]