How Abu Simbel Was Cut Into Pieces and Moved Up a Cliff

Almost everyone who visits Abu Simbel is told, at some point during the walk up from the coach park, that the temples were moved. It tends to land as a piece of trivia. It is worth slowing down on, because the thing you are about to walk into is a full-size reconstruction — every block cut, lifted, carried and set back down by hand within living memory, and put together so precisely that you cannot see the joins without being shown where to look.

Why the Temples Had to Move

Egypt began building the Aswan High Dam in 1960. The dam did what it was designed to do — control the Nile flood, generate power, and store water through low years — and in doing so created Lake Nasser, one of the largest reservoirs on earth. The Nubian valley behind the dam would fill. Abu Simbel, cut into a sandstone cliff on the west bank by Ramesses II in the 13th century BC, sat squarely inside the future lake bed.

UNESCO launched an international appeal in 1960 to rescue the monuments of Nubia. Around fifty countries contributed. Abu Simbel was the largest and most difficult piece of that campaign, and the one everybody remembers.

How the Move Was Actually Done

• Between 1964 and 1968, both the Great Temple of Ramesses II and the smaller temple of his queen Nefertari were sawn apart into large blocks, each numbered and recorded before it was lifted
• The blocks weighed on the order of twenty to thirty tonnes each, and there were over a thousand of them across the two temples
• A coffer dam held the rising water back from the working face while the cutting went on
• Everything was carried to new ground 65 metres higher and around 200 metres back from the original cliff face
• The cliff itself does not exist at the new site. Both temples now stand inside artificial domed mountains of concrete, built to carry the weight and shaped to look like the hillside that was left behind

The One Thing That Could Not Be Moved Perfectly

The Great Temple was aligned so that on two mornings a year the rising sun reaches down the full length of the axis and lights the seated gods in the sanctuary at the back — with Ptah, a god of the underworld, left in shadow. Getting a rebuilt temple to keep an alignment like that, on new ground and a new orientation, was the hardest part of the engineering brief, and it was very nearly achieved: the illumination still happens twice a year, in February and October, but a day later in each case than it did before the move.

It is a small discrepancy and, if anything, it makes the achievement more impressive rather than less. The dates still draw crowds; if you want to be there for one of them, plan a long way ahead, because everyone else has the same idea.

What to Know Before You Go

• Abu Simbel is about 280km south-west of Aswan, near the Sudanese border — most visitors come by road from Aswan, by short flight, or on a Lake Nasser cruise
• The road journey is long and usually starts very early, which is worth knowing if you are travelling with children or anyone who struggles with heat
• There are two temples, not one. The smaller temple of Nefertari is often rushed and rewards the extra twenty minutes
• Photography rules inside the temples change from time to time — check on the day rather than relying on an older account

Ramesses II built Abu Simbel to be permanent, into a cliff, facing the sunrise. Three thousand years later it was taken apart and put back together further up the hill so it could go on being permanent. Standing in front of it, both facts are true at once.