Between 1964 and 1968, engineers sawed the two rock-cut temples of Abu Simbel into 1,036 blocks and rebuilt them 65 m higher and about 200 m further inland, so that the reservoir of the Aswan High Dam would not drown them. The temples, on the west bank of what is now Lake Nasser in southern Egypt, about 230 km south-west of Aswan and close to the border with Sudan, were carved for Pharaoh Ramesses II between about 1264 and 1244 BCE. The Great Temple is fronted by four seated colossi of the king, each about 20 m tall, and is aligned so that the rising sun reaches its innermost sanctuary around 22 February and 22 October; the smaller temple honours Queen Nefertari and the goddess Hathor. Rediscovered by Johann Ludwig Burckhardt in 1813, the temples became part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site “Nubian Monuments from Abu Simbel to Philae” in 1979.
Ramesses II’s Temples at the Second Cataract, c. 1264–1244 BCE
Ramesses II reigned for 66 years, from 1279 to 1213 BCE, and filled Egypt and Nubia with new temples. Nubia, the Nile valley south of Aswan, mattered to Egypt as a source of gold and other trade goods, and the king set a chain of temples along the river there to impress Egyptian power on its people. The most ambitious pair was carved into a sandstone cliff near the Second Cataract, at the boundary between Lower and Upper Nubia. Work started around 1264 BCE and took about 20 years.
The Great Temple was called the Temple of Ramesses, Beloved by Amun. It was dedicated to Egypt’s three state gods of the time, Amun of Thebes, Ra-Horakhty of Heliopolis and Ptah of Memphis, and to the deified Ramesses himself. About 100 m to the north-east, the Small Temple was dedicated to Hathor and to Nefertari, Ramesses’ chief wife. On its facade six standing statues, slightly more than 10 m high, show the king and queen at the same size, which is rare in Egyptian art, where queens usually stand no higher than the king’s knee. Only once before had a temple been dedicated to a queen, when Akhenaten honoured Nefertiti.
Four 20-Metre Colossi and the Kadesh Reliefs Inside
The Great Temple’s facade is 33 m high and 38 m wide. Four seated figures of Ramesses, about 20 m tall and wearing the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt, flank the single doorway. The statue immediately left of the entrance was damaged in an earthquake; its head and torso fell, and during the relocation the pieces were put back at its feet exactly where they had been found rather than restored. Around the king’s legs stand much smaller statues, none higher than his knees, of Nefertari, his mother Mut-Tuy, his first two sons and six of his daughters. Above the door a figure of the falcon-headed Ra-Horakhty holds symbols that spell the king’s throne name, User-Maat-Re, and a frieze of 22 baboons along the top salutes the rising sun. A stele on the facade records Ramesses’ marriage to a daughter of the Hittite king Hattusili III, which sealed the peace between the two empires.
Inside, the rooms shrink as they go back into the hill. The first hall, 18 m long and 16.7 m wide, rests on eight pillars carved as Ramesses in the form of Osiris. Its walls carry battle scenes, above all Kadesh, the 1274 BCE fight with the Hittites on the Orontes in Syria, which Ramesses presented as a triumph although historians generally regard it as a stalemate. The best-known relief shows the king in his chariot firing arrows at fleeing enemies. A second pillared hall and a vestibule lead to the sanctuary, where four seated statues are cut from the rock: Ra-Horakhty, Ramesses, Amun and Ptah. On the leg of one of the facade colossi, Greek and Carian mercenaries serving Psamtik II scratched a note in the 6th century BCE recording how far up the Nile they had sailed.
Sunrise in the Sanctuary on 22 February and 22 October
The temple faces east, and its axis was set so that on two mornings a year the first sunlight runs through the doorway and the full length of the halls to light the back wall of the sanctuary, more than 60 m inside the rock. The beam falls on Ra-Horakhty, Ramesses and Amun, but Ptah, a god linked with the underworld, stays in shadow. Today the dates are around 22 February and 22 October, and crowds gather at dawn to watch.
The English writer Amelia Edwards was the first to describe the effect, in 1874, writing that the excavation had plainly been angled on purpose to produce it. A popular claim that the two days were Ramesses’ birthday and his coronation day has no direct evidence behind it. Neither are the present dates exactly the ancient ones: over more than three thousand years the slow wobble of the Earth’s axis has shifted the sun’s path, and the temple now sits at a new spot, so the alignment may be less precise than when it was cut. The engineers of the 1960s did try to keep it. The Great Temple was rebuilt to a tolerance of plus or minus 5 mm, and on 22 February 1966 the team gathered at sunrise to check that the sun still reached Ra-Horakhty, Ramesses and Amun, 63.1 m inside, while Ptah stayed dark; they checked again on 22 October.
Burckhardt, Belzoni and the Sand Dune, 1813–1817
Over the following centuries the temples fell out of use, and a dune slowly buried the Great Temple. By the 6th century BCE sand already reached the knees of the colossi. In March 1813 the Swiss traveller Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, who had reached Petra the year before, climbed down a sandy cleft to see the Small Temple and then, walking south, found the top of the Great Temple, with only one colossal head and part of its chest above the sand. He wrote that it was a pity the statues were almost buried by sand “blown down here in torrents”.
Burckhardt told the Italian explorer Giovanni Belzoni, who arrived in September 1816 and paid local Nubian workers two piastres a day each to dig, but ran out of food and money. He came back in June 1817 with backing from the British consul-general Henry Salt, and after 22 days of digging his party entered the Great Temple on 1 August 1817. Inside, they found air like a Turkish bath. Visitors kept arriving and the sand kept returning: William John Bankes documented the interior in 1819, Champollion crawled in on his stomach in November 1828 and measured 52 °C, and Maxime Du Camp took the first photographs in March 1850.
Lake Nasser and the Rescue Schemes of 1959–1963
The Aswan High Dam, the central project of Egypt’s post-1952 government, would create a reservoir running about 479 km up the Nile valley and raise the water at Abu Simbel by up to 60 m. Soaked sandstone loses its strength, so the temples could not simply be left underwater. In April 1959 Egypt formally asked UNESCO for help, on 8 March 1960 UNESCO launched its international campaign to save the monuments of Nubia, and by early 1962 engineers had put forward several schemes for Abu Simbel. Coyne et Bellier of France proposed a curved concrete dam 73 m high around the temples, with pumps running for ever; it was rejected for its cost of $82 million and the risk of damp. The Italian firm Italconsult proposed encasing each temple in a concrete box and jacking the whole thing up on hydraulic jacks, an estimated 250,000 tons for the Great Temple alone; UNESCO named it the preferred option on 10 June 1962, at an estimated $62 million. But by early June 1963 Egypt had adopted a third plan from the Swedish consultants VBB: cut the temples into large blocks and rebuild them on higher ground, for an estimated $36 million, about half the cost of the other two.
1,036 Blocks, 65 Metres Higher: The Move of 1964–1968
A consortium led by the German firm Hochtief did the work, with Egyptian, French, Italian and Swedish partners, and the cutting was done by Italian stonemasons trained in the marble quarries of Carrara. First came a cofferdam 370 m long, raised to 27 m when the 1964 flood came higher than expected, with pumps removing some 2.8 million litres of seeping water an hour. About 300,000 tons of rock were cleared from above the temples, the fragile sandstone was injected with epoxy resin, and the cuts were made mostly with handsaws to keep them about 6 mm wide. Blocks could weigh no more than 20 tons inside the temples and 30 tons on the facades, so the colossi’s faces were sawn off separately; the first 19-ton face was lifted on 16 October 1965. The first block had come out on 21 May 1965, and the last on 16 April 1966, without a single one seriously damaged.
The temples were rebuilt about 208 m inland, the Great Temple 65 m higher and the Small Temple 67 m higher, against reinforced concrete domes that carry the weight of an artificial hill made from the rock taken off the original cliff. The dome behind the Great Temple spans 55 m. The work was finished in 1968, 18 months ahead of schedule, and the relocated complex was opened on 22 September 1968. It cost $41.7 million, half paid by Egypt and half by 48 other countries.
Abu Simbel was one of 22 Nubian monuments moved between 1960 and 1980, alongside Philae, Kalabsha and Amada, and the campaign led to the creation of the 1972 World Heritage Convention. In April 1979 the temples were inscribed as part of the Nubian Monuments from Abu Simbel to Philae, among the second group of sites ever added to the list. To see the dam that made the move necessary, read our guide to the Aswan High Dam; for Ramesses II’s pylon and obelisks downriver at Thebes, see our article on Luxor Temple.