Looks cool, right?
Ramesses II is one of the most well-known Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, known for going on a building spree of temples and gigantic monuments, and for possibly being the Pharaoh of the Exodus as the primary antagonist in the story of the Israelites' freedom from slavery.
As the pictures show, Abu Simbel was no exception. In fact, Ramesses built this massive statue of him (times 4) to give a clear message to the peoples of the South: "Don't you dare fight Egypt because I'm so great and powerful, I can build these massive monuments and destroy you just as massively." But in addition to the warning/intimidation aspect of Abu Simbel, it was also used as a temple.
Take a quick look at the map above. Lake Nasser takes up most of where the Nile should be in southern Egypt and northern Sudan.
That's not a natural lake. It was formed in the 1960s, as President Nasser's pride and joy, the Aswan High Dam, was being built. The dam would provide as much as 25% of all of Egypt's energy in the form of hydroelectricity as well as stop the Nile's disastrous seasonal floods that had plagued Egyptians for thousands of years.
As with anything, though, there are upsides and downsides. While the Nile had repeatedly flooded its banks every year, farmers depended on its deposits of fertile black soil (silt) that would wash over their lands and bring them a good crop yield.
With the construction of the Dam, the Nile no longer flooded, there was no more silt...and Egypt began to have a food crisis that it still suffers from today. Today, the only good place to fish is near the Mediterranean Sea.
(The pollution in the Nile has gotten so bad that, when asked whether it would be safer to have oil tankers dock by the Red Sea instead of in the Nile following an oil spill in Aswan, a marine biology professor at AUC replied to the effect that the Nile is the more polluted of the two bodies of water, and nothing lives in it anyway, so there's no problem.)
With the formation of the massive Lake Nasser, hundreds of archaeological sites south of the dam were in danger of becoming completely submerged underwater. Although the flooding process had already begun with a the construction of the smaller and less effective Aswan Dam in 1902, the new dam's lake now threatened to engulf these monuments completely.
So UNESCO stepped in and told Egypt that it needed to save these monuments. From what people have told me, the Egyptians weren't convinced, being more concerned with the welfare of their own people than a bunch of ancient temples. Which is, in a way, understandable. But then UNESCO told them that they could make loads of money off of tourism from these sites...and voila! Egypt approved their request to mount a massive rescue effort.
It took over ten years, but with a combination of ingenuity, artistic and engineering skills, UNESCO and many nations worked together to move what they could to higher ground. These efforts included cutting up thousands of hundred-ton pieces of stone from the temples and painstakingly lifting them to a reassembly site, where they were put back together and set in their new places.
Without their efforts, Abu Simbel would lie about 200 feet lower today, at the bottom of the lake and only accessible (perhaps) by scuba diving. Seen here in the model at the Nubia Museum showing the submerged temple's former area (bottom of photo) and where they moved it to up the cliff.
Same thing for the temples on the island of Philae (now underwater, visible in the satellite photo as a small shadow-like oval in the lower right corner to the right of the larger island). They were moved to nearby Agilika Island, where workers had to level the island using dynamite to recreate a near-perfect landscape mirroring the layout at Philae. All the temples you see in these pictures are in identical positions relative to each other and the Sun. This is important because every year on February 22 and October 22, the Sun shines through to the back of Abu Simbel and illuminates exactly three of the four seated statues...something the ancient Egyptians originally planned quite well.
View from Aswan High Dam
Major props to all these conservationists!
Tomorrow, I'll divest so you can learn about ancient Egypt's political and religious system. I promise it won't be boring, and it'll help you understand Luxor's temples and tombs.
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