We had to get up on this morning at 4:30 am for a 7:15 flight south to Abu Simbel. The flight was only about 25 minutes from Aswan to Abu Simbel which is a small village – on the Nile of course. Abu Simbel is also only about 25 miles from the Sudan border.

There are two temples at Abu Simbel. Most people go to Abu Simbel to visit these two temples, but the town is actually Abu Simbel, not the temples. First, we will see the main temple which is the Great Temple of Ramses II (an important pharaoh). This temple was carved out of the mountain on the west bank of the Nile between 1274 and 1244 B.C. The temple is dedicated to three gods and the great pharaoh, Ramses II. The initial view is of four massive statues – all of Ramses II. The whole carving is about 100 feet high and 120 feet wide. The four main statues themselves are about 66 feet high. The temple itself is inside the mountain. You can see the entrance in the center of the carving. The carving and temple entrance can be seen in the first two photographs.

The third photo is zoomed in on just one of the Ramses statues and you can see other smaller statues carved around the base.

No one knows why this temple was built. This entire temple was covered up with sand and was rediscovered by a Swiss explorer in 1813. It took a team of workers four years to dig away enough sand and reach the temple entrance. Even today, no one knows why this temple was made at this location. Speculation is that the Egyptian pharaohs didn’t want the Nubians (the people who lived in what is today southern Egypt and northern Sudan) invading them, so they built this large temple right on the Nile. The theory is that when the Nubians came floating down the river bent on attacking the Egyptians, they would see the large statues and get scared and go back to Sudan.

Inside the temple were many rooms. It had halls, storerooms, and a sacred sanctuary to the four gods (Ramses II was eventually made a god, in addition to a pharaoh). The temple was also covered with relief carvings from floor to ceiling. Much of it looked repetitive to me. Ramses II wanted everyone to know about his great battles and his closeness to the gods (so it was all carved into the stones). Also, on the solstices, the sun shines through the temple entrance and directly into the back and most important sanctuary.

This is still the Great Temple of Ramses II. The next photo is just a lot closer to one of the large statues of Ramses II. You can also see one of the smaller statues much better and some of the many hieroglyphs carved all over the temple, both inside and out.

The next photo is a close-up of one of the statue faces. It helps to see how much detail was carved into these large statues. On Ramses right arm (left side of photo), you can see a cartouche. A cartouche is like an official name/symbol. It’s the oval shaped figure with the hieroglyphs inside it. Cartouches (French word for cartridge) were only used for gods and pharaohs.

The last photo is an odd one. The longer we stood and observed this carving, the more we saw. If you go back to the first photo in this post, you can see this row of monkeys on the very top of the carving. You can see a close-up of a few of them in this next photo. You might notice that the monkeys are sort of fully carved, including full genitals. That’s because, according to our guide, monkeys urinate once every hour. So there were twenty-four monkeys carved on top representing a whole day. Now there’s something you don’t see every day.

This temple’s history was maybe more interesting than the temple itself. As I said, no one knows why it was built in the first place. In more recent times, the completion of the High Dam above Aswan covered this temple over with water. A huge multinational project was developed and moved the whole temple and façade 200 feet higher up on the mountain to preserve it. The whole façade and temple was cut into 1,036 two-ton blocks and it took 25,000 workers three years to move it to where we saw it here today. We were glad they did.