Abu Simbel

Sometime in the sixth century BC, a group of Greek and Carian soldiers marching south with the Egyptian army stopped at Abu Simbel and carved graffiti into the leg of a giant seated statue. They wrote in Greek. They noted how far upriver they had gone, named their commander, and signed themselves. The inscription is still there, and it is one of the oldest substantial pieces of Greek writing anyone has found.

What makes it strange is the arithmetic. Those soldiers were already about seven hundred years too late to see the temple new. To them it was an ancient monument at the edge of the known world, exactly the way it is to us. Abu Simbel has been somebody's ruin for most of its existence.

A Pharaoh Who Ordered A Mountain

Both temples were cut into a sandstone cliff under Ramesses II, roughly in the middle of the thirteenth century BC. The larger one is dedicated to three state gods and, without much modesty, to Ramesses himself. Four seated figures of him fill the façade, each around twenty metres tall. The smaller temple next door belongs to his wife Nefertari and the goddess Hathor.

That second temple is worth a pause. Egyptian art usually shows a queen at knee height beside her husband, a decorative detail on a royal leg. On this façade Nefertari's statues stand the same height as the king's. It is the sort of decision that survives three thousand years and still reads clearly.

Placement was part of the point. Abu Simbel sits at Egypt's southern frontier, facing Nubia. Anyone coming up the Nile met those four faces first. Inside, the walls carry long carved scenes of the Battle of Kadesh, Ramesses alone in a chariot, the Hittite line collapsing around him. A Hittite account of the same battle also survives, and it describes the day rather differently. Both versions call it a win.

Twice A Year, Before Breakfast

The most quoted feature of the great temple is a piece of arithmetic. Twice a year, in February and October, the rising sun lines up with the doorway, travels the length of a corridor roughly sixty metres deep, and lands on the seated figures at the very back. Three of the four light up. The fourth is Ptah, associated with the underworld, and he sits in the one corner the beam never reaches.

Cutting It Up

By 1959 all of this was scheduled to drown. The Aswan High Dam would end the Nile's annual flood, which Egypt badly wanted, and the reservoir behind it would swallow the temples of Nubia, which nobody wanted. Egypt and Sudan asked UNESCO for help and around fifty countries eventually contributed to the rescue. Most sites were dismantled and rebuilt. Abu Simbel required something harder, because it is not a building sitting on rock. It is a hole in the rock.

The solution was to saw the cliff into pieces. Crews used thin hand saws rather than power blades, because sandstone crumbles and a thick cut would have eaten the carving; they steered the seams away from faces and reliefs and hid them where they could. Blocks ran past twenty tonnes. Each was numbered, photographed, lifted, and trucked about two hundred metres back and sixty-five metres up. Meanwhile a new hill was being built, since the mountain the temple needed did not exist at the new address. Work finished in 1968, with something over a thousand pieces reassembled.

The engineers' hardest constraint was the sunbeam. The whole complex had to be re-aimed to preserve the alignment, and it very nearly worked; the event now falls about a day off its old dates.

The Part They Left Broken

The upper half of one colossus had fallen long before, probably in an earthquake, and had been lying in fragments across the terrace for centuries. During the move those fragments were numbered and carried up with everything else, then deliberately re-laid in the same collapsed heap. The temple was rebuilt including its damage.

Now

The mountain behind the façades is not a mountain. There is a concrete dome inside it, covered with rock and fill. If you look closely at the statues you can find the saw lines.

The campaign's real legacy was procedural rather than architectural. The idea that fifty countries would pay to save a monument in a country not their own was new, and it led fairly directly to the World Heritage Convention of 1972. Abu Simbel joined that list in 1979 along with the other Nubian monuments rescued alongside it.

Today's problems are quieter: humidity off Lake Nasser, the breath of large tour groups, salt working its way through the carved surfaces of the inner rooms. The temple spent three thousand years inside a cliff, then was taken out of the cliff and set inside a replica of one. The only thing still standing where it started is the idea.