During the reign of Ramses II, more than 3 thousand years ago, in the Abu Simbel rock on the western bank of the Nile, two majestic ancient Egyptian temples were carved in honor of the Pharaoh himself and Queen Nefertari, his first wife. All this time, the monument of Ancient Egypt stood motionless, until in the middle of the 20th century it was disturbed.
Then the government of the country decided that in order to regulate the floods, as well as to provide Egypt with electricity on the Nile River, it was necessary to build a dam. But, as it turned out later, such an idea threatened to flood the Abu Simbel cliff. To preserve the valuable landmark, the Egyptian and Sudanese authorities turned to UNESCO for help in 1959.
The plan was as follows: to move the stone giants away from the Nile, to a specially created artificial hill. Thus began the largest ever multinational engineering and archaeological operation to rescue Abu Simbel. In 1964, using a variety of tools and techniques, the monuments were cut into 20-ton blocks and moved to a new location. The next task was to reassemble Abu Simbel. The assembly accuracy was maximum, discrepancies were allowed no more than ± 5 mm, while the orientation to the cardinal points was also preserved.
The transfer of the statues and monuments cost $ 40 million and was completed only in 1968. However, work continued after that, until 1980. During this time, 40 technical missions were carried out, and 22 monuments and complexes were moved from five continents. In gratitude for such incredible help, the Egyptian government donated four temples to the main helper countries. This is how the Dendur Temple ended up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
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Irina Pasynkova