Abu Simbel

Abu Simbel is a pair of temples cut into a sandstone cliff in Nubia, in the far south of Egypt, about 230 kilometres south-west of Aswan near the border with Sudan. They were made for the pharaoh Ramesses II in the thirteenth century BCE, the larger with four seated colossi of the king across its front. In the 1960s the whole complex was cut into blocks and rebuilt on higher ground to save it from the reservoir of the Aswan High Dam, an operation that helped give rise to the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Nubia, rich in gold and trade goods, was under Egyptian control during the New Kingdom, and Ramesses II built a series of temples there that served in part to display Egyptian power to the local population. The Abu Simbel pair stand near the Second Cataract of the Nile. Work is generally dated from about 1264 BCE and took roughly two decades, though the sources give slightly different years for its completion.

The Great Temple was dedicated to the three leading state gods of the time, Amun, Ra-Horakhty and Ptah, and to the deified Ramesses himself. Its facade is about 33 metres high, and the four colossi of the king, each around 20 metres tall, have smaller figures of his mother, his chief wife Nefertari and several of his children at their feet. One colossus lost its head and upper body in an earthquake; the fallen pieces were left where they lay. Inside, reliefs celebrate the king's campaigns, above all the Battle of Kadesh against the Hittites. The temple was laid out so that on two days a year, now around 22 February and 22 October, sunlight reaches the inner sanctuary and lights three of its four seated statues, leaving Ptah, a god linked with the underworld, in shadow. The claim that these dates marked the king's birthday and coronation has no direct evidence behind it.

The Small Temple, about 100 metres away, was dedicated to the goddess Hathor and to Nefertari. On its facade the queen's statues are the same size as the king's, which is very rare in Egyptian art.

The temples continued to be visited after Ramesses' time. Greek-speaking mercenaries serving in an expedition of the pharaoh Psamtik II in the sixth century BCE scratched an account of their campaign into the leg of one colossus; the expedition pushed deep into the territory of the Kingdom of Kush. By then, however, wind-blown sand was already burying the statues up to their knees, and the site gradually fell out of use.

The Swiss traveller Johann Ludwig Burckhardt came upon the Small Temple and the top of the Great Temple's facade in March 1813. The Italian Giovanni Belzoni began digging in 1816 and, with a party sponsored by the British consul Henry Salt, entered the Great Temple on 1 August 1817. Drawings made two years later by the French architect Jean-Nicolas Huyot reached Jean-François Champollion in 1822, and a royal name in them helped him confirm his decipherment of hieroglyphs. Champollion himself worked at the temples in 1828, with a boat provided by Muhammad Ali. Sand kept drifting back until the Egyptian antiquities service under Alessandro Barsanti cleared it for good in 1909–10.

Plans for the Aswan High Dam in the late 1950s meant the rising Nile would put the temples under as much as 60 metres of water. In 1959 UNESCO launched an international campaign to save the monuments of Nubia. Having weighed several schemes, Egypt adopted in 1963 a cheaper proposal from the Swedish firm VBB to saw the monuments into blocks and reassemble them.

Behind a temporary cofferdam, stonecutters cut the temples into 1,036 blocks between 1965 and April 1966. The blocks were rebuilt about 65 metres higher and some 200 metres inland, under concrete domes covered by an artificial hill, and oriented to keep the twice-yearly sunrise in the sanctuary. The complex was inaugurated in September 1968. Egypt and 48 other countries shared the cost of about 41.7 million dollars.

Together with other rescued temples such as Philae, they form part of the World Heritage site of the Nubian Monuments from Abu Simbel to Philae, inscribed in 1979. They remain one of the best-known monuments of ancient Egypt and are visited by hundreds of people each day.