Few sights in all of Egypt hit as hard as your first encounter with Abu Simbel. After hours crossing an empty desert, they suddenly appear against the blue of Lake Nasser: four colossal seated statues of Ramesses II, each more than 20 metres tall, guarding the entrance to a temple dug right into the mountain. It's the most shameless and magnificent piece of propaganda in ancient Egypt: a pharaoh who wanted to carve his power into the rock for all eternity, on the very edge of his empire, so that nobody arriving from the south could doubt who was in charge.
But the story of Abu Simbel has a second act that's just as astonishing. In the 1960s, the construction of the Aswan High Dam meant the temples would end up underwater beneath the new Lake Nasser. Unesco then led an unprecedented rescue operation: between 1964 and 1968, the two temples were cut into more than a thousand huge blocks, numbered and moved piece by piece to an artificial hill 65 metres higher and about 200 metres inland, where they were reassembled with exactly the same orientation. It was one of the greatest feats of modern archaeology and the seed of the World Heritage idea.
This guide tells you how to get to Abu Simbel from Aswan, how much admission costs, how the famous February and October 'solar miracle' works, and why, despite the gruelling journey, almost everyone agrees it's absolutely worth it. It's the southern tip of Egypt, the most spectacular temple of Ramesses II and one of those images that, once seen, you never forget.
Abu Simbel was commissioned by Ramesses II ('the Great') around 1264 BC, in the 19th Dynasty of the New Kingdom, in ancient Nubia, a land Egypt controlled and exploited for its gold. The Great Temple was dedicated to the gods Amun-Ra, Ra-Horakhty and Ptah, and to Ramesses himself as a god; the Small Temple was dedicated to the goddess Hathor and to Queen Nefertari, the pharaoh's favourite wife, an extremely rare honour for a woman. With the end of paganism the site was buried in sand for centuries, until in 1813 the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt spotted the colossal heads poking out of the dunes; in 1817 the Italian Giovanni Belzoni managed to clear the entrance to the Great Temple. The second great chapter was written in the 20th century: between 1964 and 1968, faced with the threat of Lake Nasser, an international Unesco campaign dismantled both temples and moved them to higher ground, saving them from the water. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Upper Egypt of great temples and royal tombs: Thebes (Luxor), Karnak, the Valley of the Kings, Aswan, Philae and Abu Simbel, linked by the classic Nile cruise.
Read the history of The Nile Valley: Luxor and Aswan →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Abu Simbel was born of an idea of power. Around 1264 BC, in the middle of the 19th Dynasty of the New Kingdom, the pharaoh Ramesses II —whom history would remember as 'the Great'— ordered two temples to be carved into the rock of a mountain in Nubia, at the far southern edge of the lands Egypt controlled. It was no ordinary spot: Nubia was the route to African gold, ivory and ebony, and also the frontier through which threats from the south could arrive. Raising a colossal monument there was a crystal-clear political message aimed at anyone sailing up the Nile: Egypt rules here, and Ramesses rules here.
The Great Temple was dedicated to the great triad of state gods —Amun-Ra of Thebes, Ra-Horakhty of Heliopolis and Ptah of Memphis— and, very tellingly, to Ramesses himself as a god, seated among the deities as one of them. The four colossal statues on the façade, about 20 metres tall, show the pharaoh enthroned, serene and eternal. Inside, the reliefs tell of his supposed feats again and again, with the Battle of Kadesh against the Hittites as the centrepiece: a war that actually ended in a stalemate, but which Ramesses turned into a tale of personal victory repeated on walls across half of Egypt.
Construction went on for some twenty years. The result was a masterpiece of engineering and propaganda: a temple that isn't built from blocks but 'hollowed out' of the mountain, with the façade and halls carved directly into the living rock. Ramesses reigned for about 66 years, fathered dozens of children and filled the country with statues and temples; Abu Simbel is perhaps the purest expression of that will to endure in stone forever.
A few metres from the Great Temple, Ramesses had a second sanctuary carved out, the Small Temple, dedicated to the goddess Hathor and to his wife Nefertari. A pharaoh dedicating a temple to a queen was already rare; showing her on the façade with statues the same size as his own —ten metres tall— was simply exceptional in Egyptian art, where the queen usually appeared on a smaller scale, at the height of the king's knees. At Abu Simbel, Nefertari stands on equal footing with the god-pharaoh.
The inscription on the façade leaves no doubt about the intention: the temple is raised for Nefertari, 'she for whom the sun shines'. Inside, the pillars of the main hall are crowned with the face of Hathor, goddess of love, music and motherhood, with whom the queen is identified. The reliefs show the royal couple making offerings to the gods and Nefertari being crowned by Hathor and Isis.
Nefertari was the Great Royal Wife during the first decades of the reign and the mother of several of the pharaoh's children. Her tomb in the Valley of the Queens, in Thebes, is considered one of the most beautiful in all of Egypt for its paintings. The Small Temple at Abu Simbel, together with that tomb, is the great testimony to the unique place she held beside Ramesses. It can be read as a gesture of love, as a political strategy to boost the royal couple's prestige among the Nubians, or as both at once.
With the decline of ancient Egypt and the end of the pagan cults, Abu Simbel gradually lost its purpose. Desert sands, pushed by the wind, began to bury the façade of the Great Temple until the colossi were almost completely covered. For centuries the site was forgotten by the outside world, known only to the local Nubian people.
The rediscovery came in 1813, when the Swiss explorer and orientalist Johann Ludwig Burckhardt —the same man who had introduced Petra to the West— spotted the heads of the statues poking out of the dunes while travelling along the bank of the Nile. All he could do was make a note of it, because the entrance was still buried. Four years later, in 1817, the Italian adventurer and 'antiquities hunter' Giovanni Belzoni, famous for his no-nonsense methods, managed to clear enough sand to enter the Great Temple for the first time in modern times. He found the halls almost intact, though emptied of objects.
The name 'Abu Simbel' caught on from then onwards; according to the most widespread tradition, it comes from the name of a local boy who guided the Europeans to the site. Throughout the 19th century, the temple became a must-stop for travellers, sketch artists and early photographers, who spread across Europe the image of the colossi half-sunk in the sand. That romance of the 'temple lost in the desert' is still part of Abu Simbel's aura today, even though the site we visit is no longer quite the one they saw.
The most astonishing chapter in Abu Simbel's recent history was written in the 20th century. In the early 1960s, Egypt began building the Aswan High Dam, a monumental project meant to control the Nile floods and generate electricity. The reservoir it would create —the future Lake Nasser— would flood a huge stretch of the Nubian valley, and with it dozens of temples and villages. Among the doomed monuments were the two temples of Abu Simbel.
In 1959, Egypt and Sudan asked for international help, and in 1960 UNESCO launched an unprecedented safeguarding campaign. After studying several options —including the fantasy of lifting the temples whole with hydraulic jacks— they chose a plan as simple to describe as it was hard to carry out: take the temples apart and rebuild them higher up. Between 1964 and 1968, an international team cut both monuments into more than a thousand blocks of up to about 30 tonnes, numbered them one by one, moved them and reassembled them 65 metres above their original position and some 200 metres inland, on an artificial hill. The Great Temple ended up supported by an enormous concrete dome, hidden under the reconstructed rock, which can be visited today.
The biggest technical challenge was keeping the astronomical alignment that made the 'solar miracle' possible. It was achieved with remarkable precision, although the readjustment shifted the dates of the phenomenon by one day compared with the original. The operation cost about 40 million dollars at the time, funded by some fifty countries. Its success showed that humanity could come together to save its heritage, and it was the direct seed of the 1972 World Heritage Convention. Without that collective effort, Ramesses' colossi would be sleeping today beneath the waters of Lake Nasser.
Rebuilt and safe, Abu Simbel became one of Egypt's great tourist icons, alongside the pyramids of Giza and the Valley of the Kings. Every year, thousands of visitors drive the desert road from Aswan or fly in to stand before the colossi. Twice a year, on the mornings of the solar miracle, the town fills with onlookers and cameras waiting for the moment the light reaches the sanctuary, in a scene that blends archaeology, astronomy and spectacle.
Since 1979 the site has been part of the World Heritage property 'Nubian Monuments from Abu Simbel to Philae', which brings together the great temples rescued from the waters. A small town grew up around it, largely inhabited by Nubians resettled after their ancestral lands were flooded, a reminder that the birth of Lake Nasser also had a human cost: the disappearance of traditional Nubia and the displacement of tens of thousands of people.
Today Abu Simbel is many things at once: the propaganda work of a pharaoh obsessed with eternity, a tribute to a queen, a temple that survived millennia of sand and the threat of water, and a monument to international cooperation. Gazing at Ramesses II seated before the lake, knowing those stones were carved more than 3,200 years ago, buried, rediscovered and finally cut up and lifted to save them, is like witnessing a whole summary of history: that of ancient Egypt and that of our own relationship with its legacy.
