Abu Simbel sits at the southern edge of Egypt, close enough to the Sudanese border that you feel the country running out beneath you. Two temples cut directly into a sandstone cliff face, commissioned by Ramesses II somewhere around 1264 BCE and finished twenty years later. The four colossal figures at the entrance to the Great Temple are each twenty metres tall, all of them Ramesses, all of them watching the river.
What makes Abu Simbel genuinely strange is that none of this is where it originally stood. In the 1960s, the construction of the Aswan High Dam threatened to submerge the entire site beneath Lake Nasser. UNESCO coordinated an international rescue operation that spent four years and around forty million dollars creating the world's largest Lego set — cutting the temples into roughly two thousand numbered blocks, relocating them sixty-five metres uphill and two hundred metres back from the water, then reassembling them inside purpose-built concrete domes disguised as hills. The orientation was preserved to within a degree. Twice a year, on the 22nd of February and the 22nd of October, sunlight still penetrates sixty metres into the Great Temple and illuminates three of the four statues in the innermost sanctuary; the fourth, the god of the underworld, remains in permanent shadow.
The smaller of the two temples was dedicated to Nefertari, Ramesses' favourite wife, and to the goddess Hathor. It's one of only two temples in ancient Egypt built by a pharaoh to honour his consort, and the inscription above the entrance reads, more or less, she for whom the sun shines. Whether that reads as romantic depends entirely on your tolerance for monuments to absolute power.
Abu Simbel is a long way from Aswan. We were up early and on the bus to the connection point for the highway, which doesn't open until 5am — so we waited in a queue for an hour or so, though it at least placed us at the front. Whether the convoy system exists because of the road, the proximity to Sudan, or something else entirely was never made entirely clear to us. About halfway, the bus stopped at a roadside café for coffee, a bathroom break, and some time with the dogs and puppies that apparently live there. En route, occasional bursts of construction interrupt the desert, and you start to see thin channels of water pulling life out from the Nile — small splashes of green against a lot of nothing.
Sights & Culture
The Great Temple of Ramesses II
The four colossal seated figures at the entrance set the tone: this is a building designed to be seen from a distance and marvelled at up close. Inside, bas-relief carvings cover almost every surface: battle scenes, religious offerings, and along one side chamber, the world's first recorded peace treaty, the 1259 BCE agreement between Ramesses II and the Hittite king Hattusili III. The main hall runs deep into the cliff, flanked by eight Osiride pillars, with smaller chambers leading off to the sides before the inner sanctuary at the far end, where the four gods sit: Ra-Horakhty, Amun, Ptah, and Ramesses himself, deified.
The Temple of Nefertari
The smaller temple has six figures across its façade, four of Ramesses and two of Nefertari, unusual in that she stands at the same scale as the pharaoh rather than at his knee, which was the conventional arrangement. The interior carvings retain patches of the original paint, which gives the whole space a different quality to the Great Temple: less overwhelming, more considered. It's worth taking time here rather than treating it as an afterthought.
Shopping
There's a small gift shop directly beside the temples and a row of souvenir stalls along the approach to the main entrance. At the entrance complex itself you'll find a handful of larger cafés and a fairly well-stocked open-sided mini-market, useful if you've arrived on the early convoy and need breakfast before the heat builds.