Wonder of the world
Two temples cut into a cliff above the Nile for Ramesses II and his queen Nefertari, the larger fronted by four seated figures of the king 20 m high. When the Aswan High Dam's lake rose in the 1960s, both were sawn into blocks and rebuilt on higher ground.
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Abu Simbel is a historic site comprising two massive rock-cut temples in the village of Abu Simbel (Arabic: أبو سمبل), Aswan Governorate, Upper Egypt, near the border with Sudan. It is located on the western bank of Lake Nasser, about 230 km (140 mi) southwest of Aswan (about 300 km (190 mi) by road).
The twin temples were originally carved out of the mountainside in the 13th century BC, during the 19th Dynasty reign of the Pharaoh Ramesses II. Their huge external rock relief figures of Ramesses II have become iconic. His wife, Nefertari, and children can be seen in smaller figures by his feet. Sculptures inside the Great Temple commemorate Ramesses II's heroic leadership at the Battle of Kadesh.
The complex was relocated in its entirety in 1968 to higher ground to avoid it being submerged by Lake Nasser, the Aswan Dam reservoir. As part of the International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia, an artificial hill was made from a domed structure to house the Abu Simbel Temples, under the supervision of a Polish archaeologist, Kazimierz Michałowski, from the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology University of Warsaw.
The Abu Simbel complex, and other relocated temples from Nubian sites such as Philae, Amada, Wadi es-Sebua, are part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site known as the Nubian Monuments.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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).
Two decades after Belzoni's removal of sand to create an entrance to the Great Temple, the Scottish painter David Roberts traveled up the Nile from Cairo and reached Abu Simbel on 9 November 1838. He spent time in the area making detailed sketches before returning downstream on 11 November. Upon his return to London in 1839, Roberts created detailed watercolours from his sketches. Four watercolours of Abu Simbel were included as lithographs in volumes 4 and 5 of The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt, and Nubia.
In 1842 Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh and his party visited Abu Simbel and were able to enter the Great Temple. He reported that the exterior northernmost colossi of Ramesses II bore traces of whitewash, having been applied by someone taking a plaster cast of the face.
The first European woman to visit Abu Simbel was the English writer Isabella Frances Romer in December 1845, who marked the occasion by cutting her name into the throne of the southern colossus.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Abu Simbel”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.