Abu Simbel

We dragged ourselves out of bed at the appointed hour and sleepily boarded the bus (Sean joined us for this excursion as well). The hotel packed us a brunch which was pretty nice. The drive took about 4 hours.

Abu Simbel has two temples overlooking Lake Nassar which is connected to the Nile River. Both temples were built by Ramses II to celebrate one of his war victories. The (naturally) larger temple is for himself. The massive statues on the front are depictions of him with his various wives and children smaller at his legs. Inside (wasn’t allowed to take pictures inside) there are a few different rooms with beautiful paintings and reliefs over all of the walls. The room straight back from the door has four statues depicting four different Egyptain gods. When this structure was originally built it was positioned so that on exactly two days of the year, the suns rays would shine all the way to the back  room to illuminate the statues of the gods. This has changed for reasons I will talk about later.

The second smaller temple was built for Ramses II’s favorite wife, Nefertari as the goddess Hathor. Across the front and on the walls inside are statues and paintings of Nefertari with the cow horns of Hathor. One of my favorite things about this tomb was the giant gold ankh shaped key that works the lock on the temple’s door.

 

The coolest thing about these temples is that their original location is now beneath tons of water from Lake Nassar. In the 1960’s the Aswan dam was being built to create hydroelectricity and to stop the Nile from flooding each year. Lake Nassar, the lake created by the dam was slowly creeping up towards Abu Simbel. It was decided that the temples would be carved out of the roce face and moved up to a higher, safer location. It took years, but they were able to carve the temples into massive blocks and reassemble them higher up in a man-made hill that overlooks the shining water of Lake Nassar. And they literally had to race because the water was steadily encroaching; at a few different times they had to set up makeshift mini-dams around the site so the water would not rush in and destroy the blocks which had yet to be moved. Very cool!

Bus ride back was uneventful. We made it back to Aswan in mid-afternoon and then grabbed lunch/dinner at a Nile-side restaurant with Sean. After eating we paid for a sundown felucca ride (a small river boat) around the Nile. In Aswan the Nile is beautiful and blue, unlike in Cairo where it is dirty and brown.