Abu Simbel

History

Construction

During his reign, Ramesses II embarked on an extensive building program throughout Egypt and Nubia, which Egypt controlled. As a major source of gold and many other precious trade goods, Nubia was of great importance to the Egyptians. He therefore built several grand temples in order to impress upon the Nubians Egypt's might and Egyptianize the people of Nubia. The most prominent temples are the rock-cut temples near the modern village of Abu Simbel, at the Second Nile Cataract, the border between Lower Nubia and Upper Nubia. There are two temples, the Great Temple, dedicated to Ramesses II himself, and the Small Temple, dedicated to his chief wife Queen Nefertari.

Construction of the temple complex started in c. 1264 BC and lasted for about 20 years, until 1244 BC. It was known as the Temple of Ramesses, Beloved by Amun.

Rediscovery

With the passage of time, the temples fell into disuse and the Great Temple eventually became mostly covered by a sand dune. By the 6th century BC, the sand already covered the statues of the main temple up to their knees. The temple remained unknown to Europeans until March 1813, when the Swiss researcher Johann Ludwig Burckhardt found the small temple and top frieze of the main temple.

When we reached the top of the mountain, I left my guide, with the camels, and descended an almost perpendicular cleft, cloaked with sand, to view the temple of Ebsambal, of which I had heard many magnificent descriptions. There is no road at present to this temple... It stands about twenty feet above the surface of the water, entirely cut out of the almost perpendicular rocky side of the mountain, and in complete preservation. In front of the entrance are six erect colossal figures, representing juvenile persons, three on each side, placed in narrow recesses, and looking towards the river; they are all of the same size, stand with one foot before the other, and are accompanied by smaller figures... Having, as I supposed, seen all the antiquities of Ebsambal, I was about to ascend the sandy side of the mountain by the same way I had descended; when having luckily turned more to the southward, I fell in with what is yet visible of four immense colossal statues cut out of the rock, at a distance of about two hundred yards from the temple; they stand in a deep recess, excavated in the mountain; but it is greatly to be regretted, that they are now almost entirely buried beneath the sands, which are blown down here in torrents. The entire head, and part of the breast and arms of one of the statues are yet above the surface; of the one next to it scarcely any part is visible, the head being broken off, and the body covered with sand to above the shoulders; of the other two, the bonnets only appear. It is difficult to determine, whether these statues are in a sitting or standing posture; their backs adhere to a portion of rock, which projects from the main body, and which may represent a part of a chair, or may be merely a column for support.

In 1815, British politician and explorer William John Bankes, accompanied only by servants and guides, travelled from Cairo up the Nile as far as the Second Cataract. On the way he visited Abu Simbel, but was unable to enter the Great Temple. He vowed to return with sufficient resources to investigate the site in detail.

In early 1816, the French ex-consul Bernardino Drovetti made an attempt to excavate Abu Simbel, leaving 300 piastres with the local sheikh to pay for digging out the temple entrance, before continuing upriver to Wadi Halfa. Upon his return, the sheikh returned the money to him as the local Nubians had been unable to comprehend what value these small pieces of metal had, and so no work had been undertaken in order to receive them.

Belzoni opens up the Great Temple

A few months later in early September 1816, the Italian explorer Giovanni Belzoni arrived, having heard about the site from Burckhardt. He recorded that the Great Temple presented just ‘one figure of enormous size, with the head and shoulders only projecting out of the sand.’ He was able to convince the sheikh that coins had value and agreed on a price of two piastres a day per man to work at the site.

Belzoni succeeded in exposing the figure over the doorway to the Great Temple, and the head and shoulders of the north-central colossi of Ramesses II, before having to abandon the effort to clear any more sand due to a lack of food and money to pay the local Nubians.

With the support of Egyptian Consul-General Henry Salt, Belzoni returned in June 1817 to Abu Simbel accompanied by Henry William Beechey, Royal Navy captains Charles Leonard Irby and James Mangles, two servants, and the Italian Giovanni Finati (also known as Mahomet), who had been loaned to them by Salt; supported by what Belzoni considered at times a troublesome crew of seven. After 22 days’ work, he and his party were able to enter the Great Temple on 1 August 1817. Finati described the occasion:

“After a continuance of these exertions and expedients during upwards of three weeks, a corner of the doorway itself at last became visible. At that very moment, while fresh clamours and new disputes were going on with our crew, and the attention of all distracted, I, being one of the slenderest of the party, without a word said, crept through into the interior, and was thus the first that entered it, perhaps, for a thousand years. Unlike all the other grottoes in Egypt and Nubia, its atmosphere, instead of presenting a refreshing coolness, was a hot and moist vapour, not unlike that of a Turkish bath, and so penetrating, that paper, carried within, soon became as much saturated with wet as if it had been dropped into the river. It was, however, a consoling, and almost an unexpected circumstance, that the run of sand extended but a very little way within the aperture, and the remainder of the chambers were all unencumbered.”

Bankes documents the interior of the Great Temple

In 1819 Bankes, accompanied by Henry Salt, Henry William Beechey, and Giovanni Finati, returned in a flotilla of four boats to Abu Simbel, to undertake a thorough investigation with the aim of fully documenting the temples, determining the nature of the statues on the facade of the Great Temple, and to locate inscriptions which might date the temples. Among the party that accompanied them were the Italian physician and artist Alessandro Ricci; the young French draughtsman Louis Maurice Adolphe Linant de Bellefonds, Jean-Nicolas Huyot, and the naturalist Baron Albert von Sack.

They stopped from 23 January to 18 February 1819 at Abu Simbel on a journey south that was to take them as far as the Second Cataract. John Hyde (c. 1780–1825) joined the group on 14 February. Of that time, three weeks were consumed in excavating the whole of the southernmost colossus of Ramesses II down to its feet. After finding graffiti on its feet Bankes uncovered the legs of the second colossus and was rewarded by finding further graffiti. Bankes had hoped to permanently remove the sand and dump it in the Nile but this proved to be impossible with the resources they had, so they simply moved the sand back and held it in place by damping it with large amounts of water. They then covered what they had previously excavated as they moved from one statue to another documenting what they had found. They left the Great Temple partly more exposed than they had found it. Later, after travelling independently, Hyde revisited Abu Simbel from 26 March 1819 until 2 April 1819.

By 27 January they had removed enough sand to be able to enter the Great Temple. To endure the heat the men stripped almost naked. Using 20 to 50 small wax candles for illumination, they were soon at work drawing what they found.

Days after Bankes's departure, the French architect and archaeologist Franz Christian Gau arrived at Abu Simbel on his return downriver after traveling as far as the Second Cataract. He found the entrance to the interior of the Great Temple partially blocked and had to crawl through on his stomach, worried all the time that the sand may fall down again and block it. He found the conditions exhausting and could only manage a few hours inside each day, with insufficient light available to create drawings. Upon his return to Europe he published his research in 1822 under the title, Antiquités de la Nubie, ou Monumens inédits des bords du Nil, situés entre la première et la seconde cataracte, dessinés et mesurés, en 1819.

Champollion

Upon his return to France Huyot sent reproductions of the meticulous drawings he had made at Abu Simbel to Jean-François Champollion, who at the time was on a quest to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs. Upon receiving them on 14 September 1822, the first cartouche Champollion saw he was able to decipher and connect to Ramesses. This allowed him to translate a second cartouche as belonging to Thutmose. As he said “Thutmose” aloud, Champollion had the epiphany that hieroglyphics was a hybrid system that mixed symbolic and phonetic signs. This breakthrough allowed Champollion to become the first man in 2,000 years to read hieroglyphs.

From August 1828 to 28 November 1829, Champollion worked with his collaborator and friend Ippolito Rosellini to lead a joint Franco-Tuscan scientific expedition to Egypt to confirm and collect data that would verify that his hieroglyphic system was correct. Among the expedition's members was Alessandro Ricci who had previously worked with Bankes. Supplied with a large sailing boat by Muhammad Ali, they reached Abu Simbel on 26 November 1828. They spent two weeks at Abu Simbel, first having to clear the doorway into interior of the Great Temple as the sand that had been cleared by Bankes had returned. Champollion described the first entry:

“I undressed almost completely, down to my Arab shirt and long linen underpants, and pushed myself flat on my stomach through the small opening in the doorway that if cleared of sand would be at least 25 feet in height. I thought I was entering the mouth of a furnace, and, when I had slid entirely into the temple, I found myself in an atmosphere heated to 52 degrees: we went through this astonishing excavation, Rosellini, Ricci, I and one of the Arabs holding a candle in his hand … After two and a half hours of admiration and having seen all the bas-reliefs, the need to breathe a little fresh air made itself felt, and we had to regain the mouth of the furnace.”

During their time there the expedition copied all of the temple reliefs. Prior to departure they removed the palisade they had installed to hold back the sand, which immediately flowed down to cover the entrance to a depth of 2 metres (6.6 ft) above the cornice.

A detailed early description of the temples, together with contemporaneous line drawings, can be found in Edward William Lane's Description of Egypt (1825–1828).

The first photographs

In 1849, the writer Maxime Du Camp was commissioned by the French Ministry of Public Instruction to record monuments and inscriptions in the Middle East using the newly developed technology of photography. Accompanied by his friend, the novelist Gustave Flaubert, he spent the years from 1849 to 1851 completing the mission, which Flaubert recorded in journals and letters, later published in English in 1972 as in Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour.

After ascending the Nile as far as the second cataract, they stopped on their return downstream at Abu Simbel, arriving at 9 am on 27 March 1850 and departing on 30 March. After docking, he had his crew begin removing the sand from around the head of the fourth colossus of the Great Temple. He commenced taking photographs the following day, taking three of the facade of the Small Temple on 28 March, and five of the Grand Temple on 29 March, as well as one of the entire complex from the other side of the Nile, and various aspects of the Great Temple. In a number of photographs, Du Camp had his servant and occasional laboratory assistant Louis Sasseti pose to provide scale.

At the end of his expedition, Du Camp bought back to France 214 photographs of Cairo, Thebes, Philae, and Abu Simbel, as well as Palestinian and Syrian monuments and landscapes. Of these, 125 calotypes (including 10 of Abu Simbel) were printed by Blanquart-Evrard and included in a book written by Du Camp upon his return to France called Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie: Dessins photographiques recueillis pendant les annees 1849, 1850, 1851. Published by Gide and Baudry in 1852, it was the first French printed book to be illustrated with photographs and was a great success.

Du Camp was followed by French civil engineer Félix Teynard (1817–1892), who photographed sites along the Nile River in 1851 and 1852. The resulting photographs were published in thirty-two installments of five plates, beginning in 1853 as Égypte et Nubie: sites et monuments les plus intéressants pour l'étude de l'art et de l'histoire. A complete edition was published in London in 1858.

American John Beasley Greene, a Paris-based archaeologist, photographed Abu Simbel in 1854.

The best known of the early photographers of Egypt was Englishman Francis Frith, who made three journeys to Egypt, Syria and the Holy Land between 1856 and 1860, first photographing Abu Simbel in 1857.

Visit of Amelia Edwards

In the winter of 1873–1874 Amelia Edwards, accompanied by her friend Lucy Renshaw and their lady's maid Jenny Lane, were among a party of 25 who journeyed southwards down the Nile from Cairo in a hired dahabiyeh (manned houseboat). Edwards later published her account of the journey in the bestselling A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1877). Lane also left behind a journal describing their adventures.

While in Cairo, Edwards had made the acquaintance of diarist Marianne Brocklehurst and her companion Mary Booth who ended up accompanying them on another dahabiyeh. Brocklehurst's own travel diary of the voyage was published in 2005. Throughout their respective travels Brocklehurst and Edwards competed with each other in the illegal removal of Egyptian antiquities.

Edwards' party ultimately reached Abu Simbel in moonlight on the evening of 31 January 1874, departing down river on 18 February after a four-day excursion to Wadi Halfa.

On 16 February, a member of Edward's party, the painter Andrew McCallum discovered what was originally called the South Chapel, but which is now known as the Chapel of Thoth. The crew were soon all at work removing sand away from the entrance which by 2pm allowed the party to crawl in on their hands and knees and by 4pm to enter with ease. Lane commented “It is a beautiful chamber & the paintings on the walls bright & perfect: not a scratch or a name written in any part of it as I am sorry to say that in most of the beautiful places are dreadfully defaced by Visitors scribbling their Names & addresses quite a disgrace to themselves & country.” Edwards and McCallum didn't share the same feeling for they and three others inscribed their names and date of opening over the inside of the doorway into the chapel.

In 1874, Thomas Cook instituted a steamer service that operated between Aswan and Wadi Halfa, passing Abu Simbel. The 1892 Baedeker travel guide reported that "Cook's tourist-steamers usually reach Abu-Simbel in the evening of the third day, in time to permit of a visit to the temples before night. Next morning they proceed to Wadi Halfah. On the return-voyage they again spend the night at Abu-Simbel, starting next morning at 9 or 10 o'clock.”

Protecting the great temple

In December 1892, the Egyptian Department of Public Works identified that there were insecure amounts of rock overhanging the façade of the Great Temple which, if they fell, would badly damage the colossi below.

At the insistence of civil engineer Sir William Willcocks, a request was made to Army Headquarters for the Royal Engineers to undertake an operation to preserve the Great Temple. In response, a 12-men detachment of the 24th (Fortress) Company under the command of Lieutenant James Henry L'Estrange Johnstone, arrived at Abu Simbel by the gunboat El Teb on 6 February 1893. Arrangements were made for the engineers to be billeted on site in one of Thomas Cook's Post Boats.

Upon arrival, they found that a large fragment of rock above the left-hand colossus was close to toppling over onto it, while an even larger piece of overhanging rock near another colossus was cracked all around. Many more tons of loose rock also required attention. Great care had to be undertaken, as much of the Great Temple was still partly buried under drift sand and the slope was extremely steep. Local Nubians were hired to create a path up a sand slope north of the temple's façade and along the hillside above.

On 10 February, a large loose rock poised on the cornice immediately above the temple entrance was removed by means of tackle attached to a holdfast. Two days later, work began on securing a 70 long tons (71 t) rock with screw jacks and a four-inch steel wire rope, attached via a holdfast of steel bars inserted into the level rock above. Once secure, the massive rock took a week to be broken up and removed.

On 27 February, while cleaning sand and stones from the rock face above the cornice, the engineers found a massive crack that severed an overhanging mass weighing approximately 650 long tons (660 t) from the solid cliff. They made excellent progress breaking it up by mechanical means until they encountered a very hard layer, which would need explosives to shatter. However, as they had been forbidden from transporting explosives on the railway and steamboats, the engineers sourced it from 9-pounder ammunition on the El Teb instead. As each piece was broken off, they were hauled up the slope by a winch and tackle, until all that remained was a block of approximately 100 long tons (100 t) weight, lying well back from the edge of a flat ledge.

Removal of the sand drift and preservation

While the Royal Engineers had made efforts to prevent, or at least slow the buildup of the great drift of sand in front of the Great Temple, the Egyptian Department of Antiquities had for many years been concerned as it was slowly but steadily covering a large part of the façade, and threatening to block the doorway. They also suspected that it might be concealing other structures. Therefore, between 1909 and 1910 under the leadership of Alessandro Barsanti, the sand was permanently cleared away.

The sand was disposed of down the slope in front of the temples so as to form a wide platform, which was held in place by a retaining wall along the riverbank. The opportunity was also taken to install a flight of steps from the new platform down to the river.

When the drift was removed, a row of statues was discovered along the terrace in front of the colossi. These consisted of figures of the Pharaoh and of the sacred hawk of the sun alternating along the entire length. A previously unknown small building, now known as the Chapel of Re-Harakhty, was also found.

An examination of the colossi found that that they were in a very dangerous condition, which was stabilized by inserting cement into the cracks and cavities. Iron pins were used to hold together the smaller cracks. In addition, a numerous repairs were made in the inner halls of the Great Temple.

Since its discovery in 1893, Gaston Maspero, the head of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities, had arranged for the grave of Benjamin Tidswell to be maintained once a year. In 1908, it was noticed that the preceding Nile inundation had undermined the grave, and that the next flood would wash it away entirely. Therefore, in 1909 the remains were removed and laid in a lead coffin, which was placed in a wooden coffin and temporary stored in a chamber within the Great Temple. On 3 January 1910, the remains were permanently interred in the corridor to the south of the façade, between the base of the southernmost colossus and the rock face, with a granite tombstone installed over it.

In the early 1950s, the only public transportation to Abu Simbel was a twice-weekly boat that carried passengers and cargo between Aswan and the Sudan.

Relocation

In 1959, an international donations campaign to save the monuments of Nubia began: the southernmost relics of this ancient civilization were under threat from the rising waters of the Nile that were about to result from the construction of the Aswan High Dam. The resulting lake would raise the water level at Abu Simbel by up to 60 metres (200 ft). Once submerged the water would cause the sandstone from which they were constructed to lose its strength and durability.

A number of schemes were proposed in early 1962 from various institutions and individuals on how to save the temples.

One scheme to save the temples, based on an idea by Irish film producer William MacQuitty, was to leave them where they were and building a dam around them, containing crystal-clear filtered water kept at the same height as the muddy Nile water outside. Visitors would then have looked at the engulfed temples from curved observation galleries on three levels. He envisaged that in time the dam would be outdated by atomic power and the water level lowered, restoring the temples to their original state. As they considered that raising the temples ignored the effect of erosion of the sandstone by desert winds, the idea was taken up and turned into a proposal by architects Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, working with civil engineer Ove Arup. Unfortunately, the proposal proved unfeasible: as sandstone is porous, the water would eventually cause the temples to crumble.

Another scheme proposed by an American construction executive was to construct concrete barges under the temples and then allow the rising lake water to raise them.

Eventually two proposals were identified as being technically feasible. One from André Coyne and Jean Bellier, from the French engineering firm of Coyne et Bellier (now Tractebel Engineering) was for the temples to remain in position, protected by a curved 240 feet (73 m) high thin-walled concrete dam with a reflecting pool in front of the temples. Visitors would arrive by boat and disembark at the top of the dam. Pumps would be required to permanently manage the seepage of water from the lake through the dam. This idea was dismissed due to the risks of the extensive drainage system failing but also due to its estimated cost of $82 million, high ongoing operating costs, and the belief that the temples would slowly be damaged by damp arising from capillary attraction.

Description

The complex consists of two temples. The larger one is dedicated to Ra-Horakhty, Ptah and Amun, Egypt's three state deities of the time, and features four large statues of Ramesses II in the facade. The smaller temple is dedicated to the goddess Hathor, personified by Nefertari, Ramesses's most beloved of his many wives. The temple is now open to the public.

Great Temple

The Great Temple at Abu Simbel, which took about twenty years to build, was completed around year 24 of the reign of Ramesses the Great (which corresponds to 1265 BC). It was dedicated to the gods Amun, Ra-Horakhty, and Ptah, as well as to the deified Ramesses himself. It is generally considered the grandest and most beautiful of the temples commissioned during the reign of Ramesses II, and one of the most beautiful in Egypt.

The single entrance is flanked by four colossal, 20 m (66 ft) statues, each representing Ramesses II seated on a throne and wearing the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. The statue to the immediate left of the entrance was damaged in an earthquake, causing the head and torso to fall away; these fallen pieces were not restored to the statue during the relocation but placed at the statue's feet in the positions originally found.

Next to Ramesses's legs are a number of other, smaller statues, none higher than the knees of the pharaoh, depicting: his chief wife, Nefertari Meritmut; his queen mother Mut-Tuy; his first two sons, Amun-her-khepeshef and Ramesses B; and his first six daughters: Bintanath, Baketmut, Nefertari, Meritamen, Nebettawy and Isetnofret.

The façade behind the colossi is 33 m (108 ft) high and 38 m (125 ft) wide. It carries a frieze depicting twenty-two baboons worshipping the rising sun with upraised arms and a stele recording the marriage of Ramesses to a daughter of king Ḫattušili III, which sealed the peace between Egypt and the Hittites.

The entrance doorway itself is surmounted by bas-relief images of the king worshipping the falcon-headed Ra Horakhty, whose statue stands in a large niche. Ra holds the hieroglyph user and a feather in his right hand, with Maat (the goddess of truth and justice) in his left; this is a cryptogram for Ramesses II's throne name, User-Maat-Re.

The inner part of the temple has the same triangular layout that most ancient Egyptian temples follow, with rooms decreasing in size from the entrance to the sanctuary. The temple is complex in structure and quite unusual because of its many side chambers. The hypostyle hall (sometimes also called a pronaos) is 18 m (59 ft) long and 16.7 m (55 ft) wide and is supported by eight huge Osirid pillars depicting the deified Ramesses linked to the god Osiris, the god of fertility, agriculture, the afterlife, the dead, resurrection, life and vegetation, to indicate the everlasting nature of the pharaoh. The colossal statues along the left-hand wall bear the white crown of Upper Egypt, while those on the opposite side are wearing the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt (pschent). The bas-reliefs on the walls of the pronaos depict battle scenes in the military campaigns that Ramesses waged. Much of the sculpture is given to the Battle of Kadesh, on the Orontes river in present-day Syria, in which the Egyptian king fought against the Hittites. The most famous relief shows the king on his chariot shooting arrows against his fleeing enemies, who are being taken prisoner. Other scenes show Egyptian victories in Libya and Nubia.

Small Temple

The temple of Hathor and Nefertari, also known as the Small Temple, was built about 100 m (330 ft) northeast of the temple of Ramesses II and was dedicated to the goddess Hathor and Ramesses II's chief consort, Nefertari. This was in fact the second time in ancient Egyptian history that a temple was dedicated to a queen. The first time, Akhenaten dedicated a temple to his great royal wife, Nefertiti. The rock-cut facade is decorated with two groups of colossi that are separated by the large gateway. The statues, slightly more than 10 m (33 ft) high, are of the king and his queen. On either side of the portal are two statues of the king, wearing the white crown of Upper Egypt (south colossus) and the double crown (north colossus); these are flanked by statues of the queen.

Remarkably, this is one of very few instances in Egyptian art where the statues of the king and his consort have equal size. Traditionally, the statues of the queens stood next to those of the pharaoh, but were never taller than his knees. Ramesses went to Abu Simbel with his wife in the 24th year of his reign. As the Great Temple of the king, there are small statues of princes and princesses next to their parents. In this case they are positioned symmetrically: on the south side (at left as one faces the gateway) are, from left to right, princes Meryatum and Meryre, princesses Meritamen and Henuttawy, and princes Pareherwenemef and Amun-her-khepeshef, while on the north side the same figures are in reverse order. The plan of the Small Temple is a simplified version of that of the Great Temple.

As in the larger temple dedicated to the king, the hypostyle hall in the smaller temple is supported by six pillars; in this case, however, they are not Osiris pillars depicting the king, but are decorated with scenes with the queen playing the sistrum (an instrument sacred to the goddess Hathor), together with the gods Horus, Khnum, Khonsu, and Thoth, and the goddesses Hathor, Isis, Maat, Mut of Asher, Satis and Taweret; in one scene Ramesses is presenting flowers or burning incense. The capitals of the pillars bear the face of the goddess Hathor; this type of column is known as Hathoric. The bas-reliefs in the pillared hall illustrate the deification of the king, the destruction of his enemies in the north and south (in these scenes the king is accompanied by his wife), and the queen making offerings to the goddesses Hathor and Mut. The hypostyle hall is followed by a vestibule, access to which is given by three large doors. On the south and the north walls of this chamber there are two graceful and poetic bas-reliefs of the king and his consort presenting papyrus plants to Hathor, who is depicted as a cow on a boat sailing in a thicket of papyri. On the west wall, Ramesses II and Nefertari are depicted making offerings to the god Horus and the divinities of the Cataracts—Satis, Anubis and Khnum.

Climate

Köppen-Geiger climate classification system classifies its climate as hot desert (BWh).

Transport

Abu Simbel Airport

It is one of the airports in southern Egypt, located 2 km from the city of Abu Simbel. At the end of 1964, a committee from the Ministry of Civil Aviation traveled to the Abu Simbel to select a suitable location to serve as an airstrip for Dakota aircraft carrying tourists wishing to visit the Abu Simbel temples. This was necessary because the temples were being relocated to their current location due to concerns about them being submerged by Lake Nasser after the construction of the Aswan High Dam. This airstrip was built in 1969 with a single 2,000-meter runway and an apron that could accommodate two small aircraft. Abu Simbel Airport is currently a domestic airport, but it has the potential to become an international airport in the future.

In popular culture

The temples appear in the 1978 film Death on the Nile based on the book of the same name by Agatha Christie.

The temples also appear in the 2001 film The Mummy Returns as part of the road to Ahm-Shere.

Gallery