as making offerings with his wife to the sacred ark of Kneph. The cartouche of 
Remeses IV. is sculptured on one of the columns. The city of Elephantine was, 
according to Strabo, adorned with quays, temples, and other public structures, on 
the same grand scale as the sacred Island of Phi he. The present quay is of Ptolemaic 
date, and contains blocks taken from more ancient monuments. 
A Christian church once stood a little to the north, and near it an interesting 
temple, but both were destroyed in 1822 by Mahmoud Bey, to build a pitiful palace 
at Asouan. Here was the celebrated Nilometer, of which the upper chambers suffered 
the same fate; the lower part, however, with the stairs, still exists. 
Elephantine was a gai’rison position on the frontier of Egypt under all the successive 
governments of its Pharaohs, its Ptolemies, and the Romans. It is now inhabited 
by Nubians, the descendants, probably, of the Nobatse, who, according to Procopius, 
were prevailed upon by Diocletian to settle in Elephantine. 
Roberts’s Journal. Wilkinson’s Egypt. 
OBELISK OF ON. 
Tins Obelisk, and some mounds of earth, are all that now remain to mark the 
site of Heliopolis, the On of Scripture, once famous for its schools of philosophy 
and astronomy, but even in the days of Strabo a deserted city, its teachers and 
students having removed to the schools of Alexandria. The Temple of the Sun, 
however, still existed at Heliopolis, and the priests administered its rites. But though 
deserted, the houses in which the mentally great had lived and studied were pointed 
out and reverenced, and those of Plato and Eudoxus, who pursued their studies 
there thirteen years under the priests, were shown as interesting objects to travellers 
from Greece. 
It was at On that Joseph, when he went into Egypt, about 1740 B.c., married 
Asenath, the daughter of Poti-pherah, the priest, in the reign of Osirtasen I., the 
Pharaoh whose name is borne on this the only Obelisk which now exists in situ 
on the ruins of this ancient city. It is probable that it was often looked upon by 
the patriarch Joseph, and might have been erected under his superintendence. It 
is rather more than six feet square at its base, and sixty-eight feet high, but the 
accumulated soil about it has left only sixty-two feet of apparent height. 
Genesis, xli. 45. 
