Abu Simbel

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Abu Simbel is a pair of temples cut into a sandstone cliff on the west bank of the Nile in Lower Nubia, in the far south of present-day Egypt, raised in the thirteenth century BCE during the long reign of Ramesses II. The larger of the two was dedicated to the king himself alongside the great state gods — Ra-Horakhty, Amun-Ra, and Ptah — and its façade is guarded by four seated colossi of Ramesses, each more than twenty metres high; the smaller temple, beside it, was given to the goddess Hathor and to the king’s chief wife, Nefertari, whose statues stand at the same scale as the king’s, an unusual honour. Both were hewn directly out of the rock rather than built up from blocks, so that the sanctuaries run back into the hillside in a deep sequence of halls.

The monuments belong to a frontier. Nubia lay at the southern edge of Egyptian control, and a temple of this size, fronted by the king’s own enormous image, served as a declaration of power addressed to the lands upriver as much as an act of worship. Inside, reliefs celebrate Ramesses at the Battle of Kadesh against the Hittites — the same campaign he commemorated across Egypt — and present the king among, and as, the gods.

One feature has drawn particular attention. The great temple is oriented so that, on two mornings each year, the rising sun reaches down the full length of the interior and lights the seated figures in the innermost shrine. The effect is real and was clearly intended, though the claim sometimes made for it — that the dates mark the king’s birth and coronation — rests on later inference rather than on any inscription, and the precise dates shifted by a day when the temple was moved.

That move is the modern part of the story. In the 1960s the Aswan High Dam created Lake Nasser, whose waters would have drowned the site — and did drown the villages of Lower Nubia, forcing the resettlement of some 100,000 Nubians in Egypt and Sudan. Between 1964 and 1968, in a campaign coordinated by UNESCO, both temples were cut into more than a thousand blocks and reassembled on higher ground some sixty metres above and away from the original cliff, the new setting built to reproduce the old. The rescue became a founding case for the idea that certain monuments belong to humanity at large rather than to a single state, and Abu Simbel was later inscribed, with the other Nubian monuments, on the World Heritage list. The temples that stand today are the same stone in a manufactured hill — Ramesses’s frontier statement, relocated to outlast the lake that nearly took it.

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