Abu Simbel Temples

The Abu Simbel temples stand on the western shore of Lake Nasser in southern Egypt, about 230 kilometres southwest of Aswan and close to the border with Sudan. The pharaoh Ramesses II had them cut into a sandstone cliff, with work starting around 1264 BC and lasting about 20 years.

The temples were partly buried by sand for centuries. The Swiss traveller Johann Ludwig Burckhardt saw the top of the main temple in March 1813, and the entrance was cleared a few years later. In the 1960s the building of the Aswan High Dam threatened to flood the site, so between 1964 and 1968 an international campaign led by UNESCO cut the temples into large blocks and rebuilt them about 65 metres higher, at a cost of about 40 million US dollars.

The Great Temple is dedicated to Ra-Horakhty, Amun and Ptah and to Ramesses himself as a god. Four seated statues of the king, each about 20 metres tall, guard its facade. Inside, halls decorated with scenes of the Battle of Kadesh lead to a sanctuary with four seated gods.

The Small Temple, next to it, is dedicated to the goddess Hathor and to Nefertari, the king's chief wife, whose standing statues are shown at the same size as the king's, which was unusual. On about 22 February and 22 October each year, the rising sun shines through the Great Temple to light three of the four statues in the sanctuary, leaving Ptah, a god of the underworld, in shadow.

UNESCO listed the site in 1979 as part of the Nubian Monuments from Abu Simbel to Philae. Most visitors arrive on a day trip by road or air from Aswan, or on a Lake Nasser cruise. Tickets are bought at the site, and an evening sound and light show is held on most nights.

Getting inside took several attempts. In 1816 the French consul Bernardino Drovetti left 300 piastres with the local sheikh to pay for clearing the entrance, but the money came back unused. The Italian explorer Giovanni Belzoni's team then dug for 22 days and entered the Great Temple on 1 August 1817. A few years later, a cartouche of Ramesses copied from the site helped Jean-François Champollion in his 1822 breakthrough in reading hieroglyphs.

Early visitors left their own marks. In December 1845 Isabella Frances Romer became the first European woman recorded at Abu Simbel and carved her name on the throne of the southern colossus. Maxime Du Camp photographed the temples in 1850 while travelling with the novelist Gustave Flaubert. The small Chapel of Thoth beside the Great Temple was found in February 1874 by Andrew McCallum, a painter in Amelia Edwards's party.

The 1960s rescue was an engineering feat in its own right. The temples were cut into 1,036 blocks, 807 for the Great Temple and 235 for the Small Temple; the lightest weighed seven tonnes, and the contract capped them at 20 tonnes inside and 30 tonnes on the facades. Visitors now walk into the temples beneath artificial hills built to recreate the original cliff. Arrive early in the morning, before the heat and the main convoy from Aswan.