Boat Trip Through History: The Temples at Abu Simbel
When we sat down to review the materials from the tour company for our Egypt trip, my BFF from graduate school and I had to make several choices about optional excursions that weren’t included in the basic trip.[1] The biggest of those excursions was an all-day trip to the temples at Abu Simbel. (Including a couple of flights in a prop plane!) As far as we were concerned, it was an immediate yes. It was definitely worth it.
Unlike most the of the Egyptian temples we saw, which were built from blocks of stone transported from the quarries of Gebel Silsila,the temples of Abu Simbel were carved out of the mountainside. They were commissioned in the thirteenth century BCE by the pharaoh Ramses II, aka Ramses the Great,[2] as a monument to himself and the first of eight Royal Wives, Queen Nefertari (b. 1301 BCE).[3] (They married before he became pharaoh and the sources suggest it was a genuine love match.)
Time passes even if you’ve styled yourself “the Great.” Over the centuries the temples fell into disuse and were slowly buried by sand.
Abu Simbel was rediscovered[4] in 1813 by Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burkhardt (1784-1817), who saw the top frieze of the main temple sticking out from the sand. Five years later, excavation of the temples began after Italian archaeologist Giovanni Belzoni[5] (1778-1823) located an entrance to the temple.
The temples at Abu Simbel are astonishing. Ramses II’s temple is dedicated to the sun gods Amon-Re and Re-Horakhte. (Nefertari’s smaller temple is dedicated to the worship of the sky-goddess Hathor. )Two enormous seated statues of Ramses II sit on either side of the main entrance to the temple. Three consecutive inner halls, decorated with pictures celebrating events in Ramses reign, extend 185 feet into the cliff.[6] The truly extraordinary feature of the temple is that it was designed in such a way that the first rays of the morning sign penetrate its inner chamber twice a year near the equinoxes— highlighting the faces of three of the four gods portrayed therein, Amon-Re, Re-Horakhte, and Ramses II in his persona as the living incarnation of Re-Horakhte on earth. The fourth guard, Ptah, the god of darkness remains unlit.
The fact that the temples can still be seen is equally astonishing.[7]
In the 1960s, the pending construction of the Aswan High Dam,threatened Abu Simbel and other Nubian antiquities with inundation in the giant artifical reservoir that the dam would form, now known as Lake Nasser. UNESCO spearheaded an international effort to save the monuments, described by André Malraux, the French Minister of Culture as “a kind of Tennessee Valley Authority of Archeaology.” It was the organization’s first major campaign since its formation in 1945. Some thirty countries formed national committees to support the operation; more than fifty countries donated money to the effort.
Several plans for saving Abu Simbel were proposed and rejected before a solution was accepted. It required engineering on a heroic scale: The team dug away the top of the cliff and then dismantled the temples, cutting them into more than one thousand blocks, each of which weighed some thirty tons. They reassembled the temples on an artificial cliff that was 180 miles inland and 64 miles above the original site, carefully aligned to reproduced the biannual entrance of light into the inner chambers.
Relocating Abu Simbel was the most dramatic portion of the Nubian Campaign. Over the course of twenty years, forty separate technical missions, drawn from across the world, saved a total of twenty-twomonuments and complexes from inundation. The last monuments to be moved were the temple complex at Philae, built in honor of the goddess Isis around 370 BCE.
In 1979, the rescued monuments were designated a UNESCO world heritage site.
[1] Though in all fairness, there was nothing basic about any of it.
[2] What made him great? In part the fact that he really, really, liked to build monuments to himself telling us how great he was. Victorian travel writer Amelia Edwards summed it up in her 1877 account A Thousand Miles Up the Nile: “We know now that some of the pharaohs were greater conquerors. We suspect that some were better rulers. Yet next to him, the other seemed like shadows…His features are as familiar to us as those of Henry VIII or Louis XIV.” —Two other rulers with big egos, I might point out.
[3] Not Nefertiti (ca 1370-1330 BCE), who was the great royal wife of King Akhenaten.
[4] A world that always sets off warning bells for me. Obviously local residents were aware that something was there.
[5] Using the term archaeologist to describe Belzoni is a bit of a stretch. He had a passion for collecting antiquities, without regard to their significance, and caused plenty of damage to the sites in the process of getting them.
[6] Roughly the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa or the Cinderella Castle at Disney World. Or if you insist on the usual comparison: a little more than the width of a football field.
[7] If you want to read a detailed account of the story of how the temples were saved, I strongly recommend Empress of the Nile by Lynne Olson.
Boat Trip Through History: Cairo’s City of the Dead
(As close as I can get to a spooky story for Halloween this year)
The down side of traveling through a foreign country with a tour is that occasionally your guide mentions something fascinating in passing that is not part of the day’s tour. It is never mentioned again, and the curious history nerd is left to find out more on her own. Case in point: on our way to the Step Pyramid at Sakkara, our guide gestured and said, more or less, “On the left[1] is the City of the Dead. It is a complex of historic Islamic cemeteries[2] where thousands of families live in and among centuries old tombs and mausoleums.” My ears perked up. And then we moved on.[3]
Photo credit Daniel Nussbaum
The City of the Dead is huge: four square miles in the original core of the city that encircle the Cairo Citadel to the north and south. The earliest section of the necropolis dates from 642 CE, when Muslim Arabs led by Amr ibn al-As, one of the companions of Muhammad, conquered Egypt. It reached its height during the period when the Mamluks ruled Egypt, from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries. It contains the graves of common people as well as elaborate mausoleums and tomb complexes built by Cairo’s elite.
People have always lived among the tombs. In the earliest periods, most of the living inhabitants had jobs related to the necropolis: grave diggers, the craftsmen who built the more ornate structures, tomb custodians, and Sufi mystics and scholars who studied in religious complexes attached to some of the most important mausoleums. Over time, small urban settlements in the area, and their residents, were absorbed by the necropolis, creating pockets of residential neighborhoods among the tombs.
Beginning in the late 19th century, the use of the cemeteries by the living increased as a result of rapid urbanization and housing shortages. Some squatted in tombs. Some moved into their own families’ tombs, particularly after the destruction of the 1992 earthquake. More constructed unofficial housing wherever they could find space.
In the course of learning more about the area, I discovered that the City of the Dead is a wonderful place to take a walking tour, with no aggressive vendors or souvenir shops trying to sell you fake papyrus bookmarks[4] and other tchotchokes. There are restored mosques, mausoleums and other medieval Islamic architecture to explore, street murals, and a cultural center that hosts artsy events and concerts, as well as walking tours with local guides. It’s also a chance to see Egyptian life up close in a way that our tour didn’t manage.
Maybe I need to go back to Cairo after all.
[1] Or possibly on the right.
[2] Many of the sources I looked at described the region as a group of cemeteries and necropolises. I immediately headed down a little rabbit hole to find out what the difference is between the two. As best I can tell, a necropolis is a large elaborate cemetery, usually attached to an ancient city.
[3] Over the coming days, we were introduced to many examples of people living in or near the ruins of ancient temples that had been half-buried by the sand. And why not? Ancient monuments were really well built—thanks to the back-breaking labor of thousands.
Moreover, stone is hard to come by in the desert. Most of the stone used in ancient Egypt was cut from sandstone quarries in the Silsila Mountains (Gebel Silsila) on either side of the Nile and then floated down river to Luxor. Gebel Silsila was also an important center for the cult of the Nile. The ancient Egyptians made sacrifices at this point of the river at the time of the yearly floods to ensure the fertility of the land. As a result, the quarries are home to shrines of all sizes and memorial stelae.
The west bank of Gebel Silsila is open to tourists. Alas, we saw it only in passing from the boat. (See downside of traveling with a tour, above)
But I digress.
[4] More on papyrus in a later post.
Boat Trip Through History: Imhotep and the Step Pyramid at Sakkara
Day two in Egypt: The stepped pyramid at Sakkara, the Great Pyramid at Giza, and the Sphinx. (Plus some tombs with amazing wall paintings and a close encounter with a camel)
I don’t have much to say about the Great Pyramid or the Sphinx. My takeaway was that the Great Pyramid is more imposing in real life and the Sphinx less so.[1]
The Step Pyramid is another story. Or more accurately, it has a story attached to it.
Most architects of the ancient world remain anonymous. We are more apt to know the name of the king who ordered a building than the man who designed it. In ancient Mesopotamia, for instance, kings had their names impressed in the brick used in the great buildings they commissioned. The first architect whose name was recorded was an Egyptian, Imhotep, the man who designed the Step Pyramid at Sakkara.
Egypt’s first major monuments, built during the First and Second Dynasties (3200-2780 BCE), were mud-brick tombs known as mastabas. Mastabas were rectangular structures with sides that sloped inward toward a flat top, built above burial chambers cut through the desert sand and into the bedrock below. Each tomb contained a chapel that held offerings for the deceased to use in the afterlife and a secret room where a statue of the deceased was stored. The interiors of the mastabas themselves were little more than narrow corridors surrounded by a solid core of rubble
In 2780 BCE, the Pharaoh Zoser founded a new dynasty and a new era of Egyptian history: the Old Kingdom, possibly the most brilliant period in pharaonic Egypt. When the time came for him to plan his funeral monument, he wanted something larger and grander than the mastabas of his predecessors. He turned to Imhotep, his chief officer and vizier, to build it for him. Imhotep took the basic form of the mastaba and transformed it something new and thrilling.[2]
Zoser’s Step Pyramid is generally considered to be the beginning of true stone architecture. It is the first building known to have been constructed with stones shaped into precise rectangular blocks. In earlier stone walls, the shape of each stone can be separately identified; Zoser’s pyramid was built with limestone blocks that were carefully fitted together with minimal joints into a smooth continuous surface. The Step Pyramid itself can be seen as a stack of stone mastabas: six immense tiers tower 200 feet high over the granite-lined burial shaft beneath it. It was more like a Mesopotamian ziggurat in shape than the classic Egyptian pyramid.
The shape was new, but many of the details were familiar. In creating Zoser’s pyramid, Egyptian builders, under Imhotep’s direction, took designs, details, and techniques previously used in buildings made from wood, reed, and mud brick and rendered them in stone. They set stone blocks in the same mortar pattern they had previously used for brick buildings. They copied the bundles of papyrus reeds that gave added strength to mud brick walls, creating engaged stone columns–one of later architecture’s basic components. The shaft of each column imitated the plant’s triangular stem. The capital at the top of each shaft was shaped like the open cluster of papyrus flowers or a lotus leaf.
In recognition of his achievements, Zoser gave Imhotep an honor no artist had received before him: a place in history. At Zoser’s order, Imhotep’s name and titles, including “chief of sculptors,” were carved on the base of a statue of the pharaoh.
In addition to being an innovative architect, Imhotep was a scholar, priest, astrologer, magician, and physician. His skill as both an architect and a physician led him to be recognized as a deity. During his lifetime, he was named the son of Ptah, the patron god of craftsmen who created the universe. Two hundred years after his death, Imhotep was worshiped as the god of medicine in Egypt and in Greece, where he was identified with the Greek god of medicine, Aesculapius.
Image of Imhotep from the 5th century BCE. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
[1] You’ll have to take my word for it. The impact doesn’t come through in my photographs.
[2] With the help of who knows how many hundreds of thousands of hard-working laborers sweating in the heat and dust. According to Herodotus, it took 100,000 men working in three-month shifts twenty years to complete the Great Pyramid at Giza (ca. 2550 BCE). Since he was writing 2000 years after the fact, we have to take the number with a pyramid-sized grain of salt.