Some cities were built with the idea of establishing cosmic order. The sky used to be a
very important component of the landscape that has been lost completely in our modern,
overcrowded, and excessively illuminated, cities. However, this was not the case in the
past. Astronomy actually played a most relevant role in urban planning, particularly in
the organization of sacred spaces which were later surrounded by extensive civil urban
areas. Today, archaeoastronomy approaches the minds of our ancestors by studying the
skyscape and how it is printed in the terrain by the visualization and the orientation of
sacred buildings. The sun was indeed the most conspicuous component of that skyscape
and was the primary focus within a large set of very unique cultures of great historical
significance. In particular, in this review paper, we will study and compare the case of
four ‘solstitial’ cities: Thebes, Hattusha, Carthago Nova, and Petra, capitals of Egypt in
the Middle and New Kingdoms, the Hittite Empire, the Carthaginian dominions in the
Iberian Peninsula and the Nabataean Kingdom, respectively. We will briefly analyse
solar aspects of the religions of these cultures and will scrutinize their capital cities,
showing how their strategic geographical position and orography were of key
importance. We will also look at how solar benchmarks, and related hierophanies,
played a most relevant role in the orientation and/or location of some of their most
significant monuments. We will finally incorporate a frame of analysis for these data in
order to come to our conclusion that different Mediterranean societies where solar cults
or symbolism are strongly substantiated display common characteristics in the
orientation and location of these cities connecting them with solstitial orientations.