Visiting the temples at Abu Simbel

Abu Simbel is a long way from anywhere, 300 km southwest of Aswan by road, and 20 km north of the Egypt -Sudan border. Remote though it is, it is home to two of the most impressive temples from all of ancient Egypt. The temples are the crowning glory in the vast selection of monuments Rameses II had built during his 66 year reign of the Egyptian New Kingdom from 1279-1213 BC. Rameses II was one of Egypt’s most powerful Pharaohs, one of the great builders and seems to have held himself in quite high regard, all things considered. You may know him as the King of Kings Ozymandias from the Shelley poem.

The two temples at Abu Simbel were carved out of a solid mountain on the banks of the Nile in Nubia -between 1264 and 1244 BC, a monument to Rameses II himself, and to his queen Nefartari. Rameses II concentrated a lot of his building efforts in the Nubian region, aiming to strengthen Egypt’s hold on the area, ‘Egyptianise’ the Nubian people and better assimilate them into the Egyptian culture and religion. Nubia was rich in natural resources, with gold and ivory, and the Nubian people were regarded as skilled artisans including goldsmiths and potters. At the entrance to the larger temple, imaginatively called the Great Temple are four statues of a seated Rameses II, each 20 metres tall (thirteen Rafes tall calculated resident maths swot Rafe), and a crowd of wives and children depicted much smaller around his knees. Inside are eight columns, all carved with a depiction of Rameses II, and hieroglyphics celebrating the great military campaigns of Rameses II- with some exaggeration as to his success. Further inside is the sacred inner sanctuary where three gods, Ra-Horakhty, Amun Ra and Ptah are shown sharing a throne with… Rameses II. Like I say, quite keen on himself, this particular pharaoh. The second, Small Temple is dedicated to his number one wife, Nefartari, and is notable because it’s one of only two temples dedicated to a queen in ancient Egypt and because the statues of Nefartari and Rameses II at the entrance are of equal size. Inside, the temple is decorated with scenes of the queen doing queen things and making offerings to the goddesses Hathor and Mut. Over time the temples were forgotten and reclaimed by the shifting sands of the desert, and only the top frieze was visible when it was rediscovered in 1813.

Possibly more impressive than the initial construction of the temples – particularly to the civil engineers amongst our readership (hello) is the relocation of the monument from 1964-1968 in an effort organised by UNESCO. The Egyptian government planned to build a new dam, the Aswan high dam to control the annual flooding of the river Nile, secure farmland and allow for management of water during times of drought. This dam created a body of water called Lake Nasser, but also displaced 90,000 people, and would have flooded the ancient temples at Abu Simbel. In a daring feat of engineering, the temples were dismantled, by being cut into pieces weighing 20 – 30 tonnes each and moved in their entirety to a new artificial mountain 65m higher and 200m away, to now sit on the shores of Lake Nasser. The project cost $42million in the 1960s. Particularly impressive is the orientation of the relocated temple which still allows sunlight to enter and illuminate the statues in the inner a sanctuary twice a year (apart from Ptah, being associated with the world of the dead, he remains in darkness). This occurs on October 22 and February 22, possibly the dates of Rameses birthday and coronation.

It’s easy, if a bit of a long boring drive through the desert to get to the temples. As soon as we’d booked our accommodation in Aswan, the owner, the ever helpful Mohamed asked if we needed help organising trips to any of the sights around Aswan. For the four of us, the price was the same for a seat on a shared bus or an airconditioned car to ourselves, so we opted for the luxury of our own car. For many years, following the terrorist attacks at Deir el-Bahari in 1997, tourists could only travel to Abu Simbel in organised conveys with police escorts twice a day. This requirement has now been lifted, but we had to provide details of our passports to the police who checked us in and out of a series of checkpoints along the 3.5 hour drive. We set off from Elephantine Island before dawn at 5am and arrived a little after 8am at the temples. At the arrival checkpoint, the police told us we could have two hours to enjoy the site and had to meet our driver outside after the allotted time. The reasoning for this was not entirely clear, but we managed to negotiate the nik-nak souk outside, purchase our tickets, walk to and have a look around both temples and even have a quick (and extremely expensive) fanta in the cafe in the time. There’s a small, but interesting visitor centre as well, which mostly concentrated on the daring rescue of the temples from the rising waters of Lake Nasser.