ABU SIMBEL
THE EXQUISITE TEMPLES THAT HAD TO BE MOVED
For centuries Egypt has been admired for its unmatched pharaonic masterpieces of architectural design and construction engineering that produced beautiful structures worthy of admiration, curiosity and wonder – yet, Egypt's engineering expertise is not confined to antiquity.
Following the 1952 Egyptian Revolution, also known as the 1952 Coup d'etat and 23 July Revolution, the then Prime Minister of Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser implemented an ambitious plan to regulate the flooding of the Nile, increase agricultural productivity and generate hydropower by proposing to build a new dam across the mighty Nile River as a replacement for the existing Low Dam, which was built by the British from 1889-1902, that was found to be inadequate after it almost overflowed in 1946 despite being raised twice before – between 1907 and 1912 and again between 1929 and 1933.
Construction of the Aswan High Dam or Saad el Aali in Arabic, 560 miles south of Cairo in the middle of the arid Egyptian desert, began on 9 January 1960; work on the impressive embankment dam, a feat of engineering design, that measures approximately 13,000 feet in length, 364 feet in height with a base width of 3,220 feet that tapers to 130 feet wide at the crest was completed on 21 July 1970 – the damming of the Nile created the world's third largest man-made lake, aptly name Lake Nasser, that stretches from the city of Aswan down to the border with Sudan.
Although Prime Minister Nasser’s was plan successful in controlling the Nile’s annual devastating floods, the project, however, was not without its controversy – Egyptian fellahin, peasants and Sudanese Nubian nomads whose civilization had called the banks of the Nile home for millennia were forced to abandon their homes and move elsewhere; and most of all, the rising waters threatened to put thousands of years of history at risk and required the relocation of 22 important pharaonic monuments including the 13th century B.C. Abu Simbel temple complex, which would otherwise have been submerged.
As the rising waters of lake Nassar threatened to engulf the 3,300-year-old temples of Abu Simbel that had survived through ancient times, an international team of hydrologists, engineers, archaeologists and other UNESCO professionals banded together with Egyptian forces for an extraordinary salvage operation to relocate the complex commenced in November 1963.
With the greatest care steel wires and hand saws were used to slice up the rocks that made up the temples into blocks weighing 20 to 30 tons, in all the larger temple yielded 807 blocks and the smaller temple 235 – power saws could not be used because they made the cuts wider than 8 millimetres that would have been visible when the blocks were put back together.
Once cut, each block was numbered, coated to protect it against splitting and fracturing and transported to a desert plateau about 200 feet above and 600 feet west of their original site for reassembly in its original grandeur on a man-made mountain facade created using rock that resembled the natural stony hill against which the temples stood at the original site.
Care was taken to recalculate the precise alignment to the cardinal directions needed to recreate the same solar alignment, assuring that twice a year, on 22 February – the date of Ramses II’s ascension to the throne and 22 October – his birthday, the rising sun would continue to penetrate the sanctuary through a narrow opening to illuminate the sculpted face of King Ramses II and those of two other statues on the back wall deep inside the Great Temple's interior.
A colourful ceremony in September 1968, marked the project's completion.