Open Veils · Answer
Who was the empire of the sun?
The phrase 'Empire of the Sun' is itself a translation of 'Nihon' — Japan — meaning the Land of the Rising Sun, the solar empire of East Asia. But the deeper esoteric and historical record points to far older solar empires: priest-king civilizations organized around solar theology, stretching from Heliopolis in Egypt to the Inca's Tawantinsuyu, to Vedic Surya-worship. The question of which civilization truly held the title of a 'solar empire' is a live debate across alternative history.
Evidence
- According to Graham Hancock and John Anthony West, the most architecturally sophisticated solar empire may predate Egypt's dynastic period by thousands of years — a lost civilization whose solar symbolism was inherited, not invented, by later cultures.
- Zecharia Sitchin argued in his Earth Chronicles series that the original 'solar empire' was Sumerian, governed by the Anunnaki pantheon whose chief deity Utu/Shamash was literally the sun god presiding over law, justice, and kingship — the solar disc appearing on the famous Hammurabi stele.
- In Mesoamerica, researchers like Matthew LaCroix and Brien Foerster note that the Inca's Tawantinsuyu — 'The Four Quarters of the World' — was explicitly a solar empire: the emperor was the Sapa Inca, the Son of Inti (the sun), and the Coricancha temple was sheathed in gold to mirror solar radiance.
- The Sphinx's orientation to the equinox sunrise and the Heliopolis 'City of the Sun' tradition suggest, per Robert Schoch's geological analysis, an origin point far earlier than mainstream Egyptology accepts.
- Sitchin read this not as metaphor but as literal governance by beings associated with the sun's power.