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This chapter examines the influence of the town of Heliopolis—the center of the sun cult in Egypt—on the foundation and development of the royal cemetery in Abusir. It begins with an overview of the history and meaning of the sun cult in ancient Egypt, showing that sun worship in the Nile Valley can be traced to prehistory. It then describes some pyramid complexes built in ancient Heliopolis, including the pyramid complex of Sahure, and the decline of the Abusir necropolis. It also discusses the decline of the Fourth Dynasty and the rise of the Fifth Dynasty; the mystery surrounding three royal mothers, all named Khentkaus; the papyri as fragmentary records of the Abusir pyramid temple administration and economy; Ptashshepses, the vizier and son-in-law of Nyuserre; and the funerary cult of the kings buried at Abusir. The chapter concludes with an assessment of sun temples of the Fifth Dynasty kings.

This epilogue considers some of the challenges that lie ahead for the Czech archaeological team, led by Ludwig Borchardt, with regard to exploration of Abusir. After Borchardt's archaeological excavations before World War I and subsequently more than half a century of Czech explorations, it seems like all important archaeological monuments in Abusir have already been found and examined and no more major discoveries can be expected. However, the opposite is true. The chapter discusses the problems concerning the dominant monuments in the Abusir royal cemetery—the pyramids. It also highlights the fact that many large tombs in the immediate vicinity of the pyramids remain unexplored and concludes with an overview of another archaeological challenge facing the Czech team in South Abusir: the unfinished excavation of the cemetery from the Early Dynastic Period, adjacent from the east to the Old Kingdom cemetery.

This chapter discusses the change in how scholars view Abusir, in part due to the discovery of a cemetery with shaft tombs dating from the end of the Twenty-sixth and the beginning of the Twenty-seventh Dynasty—that is, from the end of what is known as the Saite Period and the beginning of the first period of Persian domination over Egypt. Until recently, Egyptologists and archaeologists looked at Abusir in a distinctly one-sided way. Thanks to the pyramids built in Abusir by the pharaohs of the Fifth Dynasty, the village was regarded as a relatively short-lived royal cemetery belonging exclusively to that period. The chapter first describes the archaeological excavations made by a Czech team in the newly discovered cemetery with shaft tombs in Abusir before examining the mystery surrounding Wedjahorresnet's funerary monument in Abusir. It also considers two shaft tombs, one belonging to Iufaa and the other to Menekhibnekau.

The ruins of Ur in Iraq are the most beautiful and eloquent in all Mesopotamia. After some explorations and probes, the first of which go back to 1854, the Ur excavations began in 1918 under the direction of Sir Leonard Woolley. In 1922, the ziggurat and the great rectangular platform surrounding it had been partly exposed. From this trench many clay vessels emerged, as well as beads of cornelian, lapis lazuli and even gold, sure evidence of the presence of tombs. Excavating a cemetery, above all in Mesopotamia, is always technically difficult and, as Woolley's labourers and the archaeologist himself lacked experience, he had the admirable sense to close the workings and not return until four years later. The celebrated ‘royal cemetery’ of Ur was thus excavated between 1926 and 1932, at a rate of three or four months a year.

Chapter 5 focuses on Ur, Tell al-Muqayyar, in southern Iraq, and the discovery and popularization, after the First World War, of Sumerian civilization, largely unknown until then. Excavated between 1922 and 1934 by an Anglo-American expedition directed by Leonard Woolley, the most prominent public archaeologist of the Near East between the wars, Ur became a spectacle of a distant antiquity that was related to modernity. The discovery of Ur’s cemeteries, studied here, competed with the contemporary exposure of the tomb of Tutankhamun. The chapter considers Ur’s appeal as an “antique modern”, combining the drawing power of the biblical paradigm manifested in the identification between Ur, Abraham, and the birth of Abrahamic religions, and the appeal of the material riches discovered in the cemeteries, extracted from their place of origin and displayed in metropolitan museums and venues, a process which the chapter recovers. Represented as an Ur-culture, the place of origin of Near Eastern and world civilizations, older than Egypt, Ur was modernized and envisioned as the hub of a global ancient world, a vision that matched mandate notions about the development of Iraq. At the same time, evidence of live burials at the cemeteries was connected to mass killing during the First World War and the commemoration of the war dead. In addition to written, archival, and published sources, the chapter makes use of a wealth of visual representations, including aerial photography, illustrations, and archaeological objects.