Abu Simbel

The rescue of Abu Simbel is told as one of the great successes of international cooperation, and as an engineering matter it was. Between 1964 and 1968 both temples were cut into 1,036 blocks, lifted, and rebuilt about sixty metres higher and two hundred metres back from the water, inside an artificial hill with a concrete dome carrying the load so that the rock-cut chambers would not take the weight of the fill above them. The cuts were made with hand saws whose teeth were tipped with diamond, because a powered saw would have turned more of the stone to dust. The reassembly was accurate enough that the solar alignment still works.

What is usually left out is that the same reservoir displaced the people who lived along that stretch of river.

Roughly a hundred thousand Nubians in Egypt were moved and resettled in new villages around Kom Ombo, several hundred kilometres north of their land and in a different landscape. Around fifty thousand more in Sudan were moved from Wadi Halfa to New Halfa, near the Ethiopian border. For many families this was not the first time: the original Aswan Dam and its heightenings had already flooded Nubian land in 1902, 1912 and 1933, so some communities were displaced for the fourth time in sixty years. Villages, date groves, mosques, shrines and cemeteries are under Lake Nasser and were not cut into blocks and lifted.

The Nubian claim did not end there. Egypt's 2014 constitution contains an article obliging the state to return the people of Nubia to their original areas and develop them within ten years. Presidential decrees issued in 2014 and 2016 designated large parts of that land either a military zone or an area allocated for agricultural reclamation, which had the effect of putting it beyond return. Nubian campaigners have pressed the point since, at some cost.

The contrast is worth holding steady, because it is not a rhetorical one. An international campaign raised roughly forty-two million dollars and mobilised engineers from several countries to save two buildings from the water. The population whose ancestors had lived beside those buildings for millennia was relocated, and is still asking to go home.

Engineers who moved Abu Simbel had to preserve not just the statues but a precisely timed shaft of sunlight, and they got it right to within a day.

Four giants, one already broken

The temple's facade is dominated by four seated colossal statues of Ramesses II, each over twenty metres tall; one had already collapsed in antiquity, likely due to an earthquake, and its fallen fragments were preserved and reassembled on the ground beside the temple during the relocation rather than restored to their original position, keeping the ancient damage visible rather than erasing it.

Light reaching exactly where it should

The temple's interior was originally aligned so that sunlight penetrated the full length of the structure twice a year to illuminate statues of the gods and the king deep in the inner sanctuary, leaving one figure, associated with the underworld, permanently in shadow. When engineers cut the temple apart and reassembled it on higher ground during the 1960s rescue from the rising waters of Lake Nasser, they recalculated the new structure's orientation specifically to preserve this solar alignment, succeeding closely enough that the illumination still occurs within roughly a day of its original ancient dates.

An engineering feat built to be invisible

The temple was cut into more than a thousand blocks, moved and reassembled inside an artificial mountain built specifically to replicate its original setting, a project intended, and largely successful, at making the relocation itself disappear from a visitor's experience of the site.