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. 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. , showing sand partially covering the Great Temple
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. After 22 days’ work, he and his party were able to enter the Great Temple on 1 August 1817.
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. 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. 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 so exhausting and could only manage a few hours inside each day, with insufficient light available to create drawings. This allowed him to translate a second cartouche as belonging to
Thutmose. 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. 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. File:Illustration by David Roberts, digitally enhanced by rawpixel-com 75.jpg|The temples of Abu Simbel File:Illustration by David Roberts, digitally enhanced by rawpixel-com 6.jpg|The colossal figures in front of the Great Temple File:Illustration by David Roberts, digitally enhanced by rawpixel-com 12.jpg|The interior of Abu Simbel File:Illustration by David Roberts, digitally enhanced by rawpixel-com 11.jpg|The inner sanctuary of the Great Temple 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 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. 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. Other 19th century photographers of Abu Simbel included
Pascal Sébah and
Antonio Beato.
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. 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. The engineers also cleared away debris which had piled up in front of the entrance to the Chapel of Thoth. 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.
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 . Once submerged the water would cause the sandstone from which they were constructed to lose its strength and durability. 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. high ongoing operating costs, and the belief that the temples would slowly be damaged by damp arising from capillary attraction. The second was from the Italian firm of Italconsult, following an idea by Pierre Gassola. They proposed cutting away the top of the cliff above the temples, before cutting behind them to sever them from the cliff. and as well as its significant cost it would take three years before it would be possible to actually commence raising the temples, despite the reservoir was expected to begin being raised in the autumn of 1964. This proposal was estimated to cost $62 million. Max McCullough a special assistant for educational and cultural affairs in the State Department, who was the American representative on the UNESCO committee stated, "This means that for the first time we have a plan acceptable to everybody and, secondly that we are within striking distance of the money required for the project." By 14 June 1963 agreement had been also been reached on how to finance the work. was appointed to lead the team of contractors, which was called “Joint Venture Abu Simbel” (JVAS). Walter Jurecha was appointed project manager, with Carl Theodar Mackel in charge of site activities. VBB led by Karl Fredrick Ward (as the project's head engineer) was retained as the project's consulting engineers and architects. Their involvement was to last for approximately 10 years. The actual cutting and a reassembly of the temples was entrusted to the Impreglio, who intended to employ
marmisti (stone cutters) who had learnt their trade cutting marble in the
Carrara quarries to undertake the actual cutting. This material was sourced from the excavations above behind the temples. Work continued in three 12-hour shifts, 24 hours a day, seven days a week until the it was then found that water was seeping up via the soil under the cofferdam. To prevent it reaching the temples, drilling rigs were bought in to drill 15 deep wells in each of which an underwater pump was installed to remove any seepage. totalling Each block was given a unique identification code (which identified its exact position) and carefully transported on a sand cushion in a slow-moving trailer to one of two temporary holding storage areas with a total area of . were living in the construction village, of whom 1,850 were working on site.
Reassembling the temples Meanwhile, in January 1966, Prior to the project, visitors had to bring their own lamps with them to inspect the interiors of the temples. As it was expected that visitor numbers would increase, permanent electric lighting was installed, as well as a mechanical ventilation system hidden in the domes, both for the comfort of visitors and to protect the interior decoration from the effects of temperature and humidity. On 22 February 1966, members of the team gathered at sunrise to confirm that the statues of Ramesses, Amun, and Ra-Horakhty were illuminated by the sun's rays, 63.1 metres At the time, the relocation was considered one of the greatest challenges of archaeological engineering in history. The success of the relocation of Abu Simbel helped the United Nations to introduce a convention establishing the
UNESCO World Heritage List. The project had cost $41.7 million or 18.5 million Egyptian pounds (equivalent to $ million in ), of which half was borne by Egypt and half provided by international contributions from 48 countries. This was approximately 10% higher than the VBB's original estimate. Today, hundreds of tourists visit the temples daily. Most visitors arrive by road from
Aswan, the nearest city. Others arrive by plane at
Abu Simbel Airport, an airfield specially constructed in the 1970s to serve the temple complex, with year-round flights to nearby
Aswan International Airport and limited seasonal flights to
Cairo International Airport. It was built on the site of the larger of the two temporary holding storage areas used during relocation of the temple. ==Description==