When we sat down to review the materials from the tour company for our Egypt trip, my BFF from graduate school and I had to make several choices about optional excursions that weren’t included in the basic trip.[1] The biggest of those excursions was an all-day trip to the temples at Abu Simbel. (Including a couple of flights in a prop plane!)  As far as we were concerned, it was an immediate yes. It was definitely worth it.

Unlike most the of the Egyptian temples we saw, which were built from blocks of stone transported from the quarries of Gebel Silsila,the temples of Abu Simbel were carved out of the mountainside. They were commissioned in the thirteenth century BCE by the pharaoh Ramses II, aka Ramses the Great,[2] as a monument to himself and the first of eight Royal Wives, Queen Nefertari (b. 1301 BCE).[3] (They married before he became pharaoh and the sources suggest it was a genuine love match.)

Time passes even if you’ve styled yourself “the Great.” Over the centuries the temples fell into disuse and were slowly buried by sand.

Abu Simbel was rediscovered[4] in 1813 by Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burkhardt (1784-1817), who saw the top frieze of the main temple sticking out from the sand. Five years later, excavation of the temples began after Italian archaeologist Giovanni Belzoni[5] (1778-1823) located an entrance to the temple.

The temples at Abu Simbel are astonishing. Ramses II’s temple is dedicated to the sun gods Amon-Re and Re-Horakhte. (Nefertari’s smaller temple is dedicated to the worship of the sky-goddess Hathor. )Two enormous seated statues of Ramses II sit on either side of the main entrance to the temple. Three consecutive inner halls, decorated with pictures celebrating events in Ramses reign, extend 185 feet into the cliff.[6] The truly extraordinary feature of the temple is that it was designed in such a way that the first rays of the morning sign penetrate its inner chamber twice a year near the equinoxes— highlighting the faces of three of the four gods portrayed therein, Amon-Re, Re-Horakhte, and Ramses II in his persona as the living incarnation of  Re-Horakhte on earth. The fourth guard, Ptah, the god of darkness remains unlit.

The fact that the temples can still be seen is equally astonishing.[7]

In the 1960s, the pending construction of the Aswan High Dam,threatened Abu Simbel and other Nubian antiquities with inundation in the giant artifical reservoir that the dam would form, now known as Lake Nasser. UNESCO spearheaded an international effort to save the monuments, described by André Malraux, the French Minister of Culture as “a kind of Tennessee Valley Authority of Archeaology.” It was the organization’s first major campaign since its formation in 1945. Some thirty countries formed national committees to support the operation; more than fifty countries donated money to the effort.

Several plans for saving Abu Simbel were proposed and rejected before a solution was accepted. It required engineering on a heroic scale: The team dug away the top of the cliff and then dismantled the temples, cutting them into more than one thousand blocks, each of which weighed some thirty tons. They reassembled the temples on an artificial cliff that was 180 miles inland and 64 miles above the original site, carefully aligned to reproduced the biannual entrance of light into the inner chambers.

Relocating Abu Simbel was the most dramatic portion of the Nubian Campaign. Over the course of twenty years, forty separate technical missions, drawn from across the world, saved a total of twenty-twomonuments and complexes from inundation. The last monuments to be moved were the temple complex at Philae, built in honor of the goddess Isis around 370 BCE.

In 1979, the rescued monuments were designated a UNESCO world heritage site.

[1] Though in all fairness, there was nothing basic about any of it.

[2] What made him great? In part the fact that he really, really, liked to build monuments to himself telling us how great he was. Victorian travel writer Amelia Edwards summed it up in her 1877 account A Thousand Miles Up the Nile: “We know now that some of the pharaohs were greater conquerors. We suspect that some were better rulers. Yet next to him, the other seemed like shadows…His features are as familiar to us as those of Henry VIII or Louis XIV.” —Two other rulers with big egos, I might point out.

[3] Not Nefertiti (ca 1370-1330 BCE), who was the great royal wife of King Akhenaten.

[4] A world that always sets off warning bells for me. Obviously local residents were aware that something was there.

[5] Using the term archaeologist to describe Belzoni is a bit of a stretch. He had a passion for collecting antiquities, without regard to their significance, and caused plenty of damage to the sites in the process of getting them.

[6] Roughly the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa or the Cinderella Castle at Disney World. Or if you insist on the usual comparison: a little more than the width of a football field.

[7] If you want to read a detailed account of the story of how the temples were saved, I strongly recommend Empress of the Nile by Lynne Olson.