THE TEMPLES AT ABU SIMBEL

Discovered in 1813, moved wholesale to their present location between 1964 and 1968, the Great and Small Temples at Abu Simbel were twin monuments of Rameses II to himself and his wife. Egyptologist Nigel Fletcher-Jones, whose new book Abu Simbel and the Nubian Temples was published last year, takes us on a guided tour.

- Nigel Fletcher-Jones

The Great and Small Temples at Abu Simbel – 230 kilometres south of the Egyptian town of Aswan – caught the imagination of the world when they were cut into blocks and moved on to high ground above the rising waters of Lake Nasser between 1964 and 1968.

Today, these magnificent rock-cut temples attract many thousands of visitors each year, but the iconic Great Temple went unnoticed by the earliest European explorers, who visited only the Small Temple nearer to the Nile’s western bank. The Swiss-born explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt (1784-1817) – who had previously rediscovered the Nabataean city of Petra in 1812 – found the barest tops of the colossal statues that flank the entrance purely by accident. His journal entry of 22 March 1813 records the event:

Having, as I supposed, seen all the antiquities of Ebsambal [Abu Simbel], I was about to ascend the sandy side of the mountain… when having luckily turned more to the southward, I fell in with what is yet visible of four immense colossal statues cut out of the rock… they are now almost entirely buried beneath the sands, which are blown down here in torrents.

After making further notes, Burckhardt continued his explorations – heading further south and then east to Mecca and Medina – and it was not until 19 June 1815 that he returned to Cairo. At some point afterwards, Burckhardt made the acquaintance of the Paduan showman turned water-engineer Giovanni Battista Belzoni (17781823). When Belzoni was commissioned by the British consul Henry Salt (1780-1827) to retrieve a colossal head of the ‘Young Memnon’ (now a centrepiece of the British Museum) from the west bank of the Nile near Luxor, he took advantage of a lull in the proceedings to head south to Abu Simbel, arriving on 8 September 1816.