A billboard on the border
Abu Simbel was built in the mid-thirteenth century BCE, over about twenty years, deep in Nubia, the land south of the First Cataract that Egypt had conquered for its gold and its trade routes. Nobody needed a great temple here for the local population. The point was the river. Every boat travelling between Nubia and Egypt passed below the cliff, and from the water the façade could be read at a glance: four seated colossi of Ramesses II, each about 20 metres high, wearing the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt.
Among Egypt’s largest statues these are the best placed. Small figures of the queen, the king’s mother and his children stand between the giants’ legs, barely reaching their knees, and a row of baboons, animals that greet the rising sun, runs along the top of the façade. Above the door, a falcon-headed sun god holds the signs that spell out the king’s throne name.
A temple made by taking away
Abu Simbel is a rock-cut temple, that is, one carved out of the cliff instead of built from blocks. The workers started from the face of the rock and dug inwards, leaving in place whatever had to stay: walls, statues, pillars. In the first hall, eight pillars carry statues of Ramesses as Osiris, god of the dead, standing like a guard of honour. They were never put there. The room was emptied around them.
The walls of this hall show the king’s wars, above all the battle of Kadesh against the Hittites (about 1274 BCE), told as a personal victory of Ramesses. The further you go, the smaller and darker the rooms become, until the sanctuary at the far end. Here four seated gods share a bench: Ra-Horakhty, the sun at dawn; Ramesses himself, now a god; Amun-Ra, king of the gods; and Ptah, god of Memphis and of craftsmen.
Why is Ptah left in the dark?
Twice a year, around 22 February and 22 October, the rising sun shines straight down the axis of the temple and lights up three of the four statues in the sanctuary. Ptah stays in shadow. That fits him well: he was linked to the earth and the underworld, and the effect looks deliberate, although no ancient text explains it. The popular idea that the two dates were the king’s birthday and coronation day has no evidence behind it. What we can say is that the temple was aligned so that the sun, and with it the sun god, entered the mountain to meet the king.
A queen as tall as the king
A little to the north, a second, smaller temple is dedicated to Hathor and to Nefertari, Ramesses’s chief wife. Its façade has six standing statues, about 10 metres high: four of the king and two of the queen. Nefertari is carved at the same height as her husband, which was unusual in Egyptian art, where size usually follows rank. Inside, Hathor appears on the pillars with her cow’s ears, and the queen is shown making offerings in her own right.
Graffiti, sand and rediscovery
About 650 years after the temple was finished, in 591 BCE, the pharaoh Psamtik II sent an army into Nubia. Some of his soldiers were Greek and Carian mercenaries, and on the way back they cut their names into the left leg of one of the colossi. Their inscription, in an early Greek alphabet, is one of the oldest Greek texts known. These soldiers’ graffiti are older than the Parthenon.
Over the following centuries sand slid down the cliff and buried the façade up to the colossi’s chins. In 1813 the Swiss traveller Johann Ludwig Burckhardt saw the tops of the heads, and in 1817 the Italian Giovanni Battista Belzoni dug his way in.
Moving a mountain
In the 1960s the new Aswan High Dam was about to create Lake Nasser, and Abu Simbel would have ended up underwater. Between 1964 and 1968, an international campaign led by UNESCO cut both temples into 1,035 blocks weighing between 7 and 30 tonnes each. The blocks were lifted 65 metres higher and about 200 metres inland, and reassembled against an artificial hill held up by a concrete dome. Together the two temples weighed some 320,000 tonnes. The same campaign saved other Nubian monuments, among them the temple of Isis at Philae.
The engineers kept the original orientation, but the sun now enters one day later than it did in antiquity: on 22 February and 22 October instead of the 21st. If you look at the façade on the map of ancient Egypt, the message is still the same: here, upriver, Egypt begins.
Where to see it
Abu Simbel stands on the shore of Lake Nasser, in Aswan Governorate, close to the border with Sudan. Most visitors come on a day trip from Aswan, by road or by a short flight. The sun festival on 22 February and 22 October draws large crowds before dawn; check the opening times and access rules with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities before you go.
Sources
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Nubian Monuments from Abu Simbel to Philae”.
- UNESCO, “Victory in Nubia: Abu Simbel” and the archive of the International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia.
- Webuild, “Nubiana: the great undertaking that saved the temples of Abu Simbel”.
- “L’iscrizione dei mercenari greci ad Abu Simbel”, Axon 2.1 (2018).
- C. Desroches Noblecourt and C. Kuentz, Le petit temple d’Abou Simbel (1968).
- G. B. Belzoni, Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries… in Egypt and Nubia (1820).
