Not far from the Egyptian-Sudanese border is Lake Nasser, a gigantic reservoir created by the Aswan High Dam. Back in the late 1950s, when the dam was just being designed, it became clear that the water would flood the Nile floodplain for about 500 kilometers.
The rock temple of Pharaoh Ramses II was built around 1260 BC. e. to commemorate his victory over the Hittites at the Battle of Kadesh
These places were poorly populated, and the fate of 45 poor Nubian villages, scattered on the future bottom of the artificial lake, was decided quickly. New comfortable settlements were built for residents. It turned out to be much more difficult to save historical monuments. The most outstanding of them are the temples of Pharaoh Ramses II and his royal wife Nefertari, carved into the rocks on the western bank of the Nile (280 km south of Aswan, near the village of Abu Simbel).
The rock temple of Pharaoh Ramses II was built around 1260 BC. e. to commemorate his victory over the Hittites at the Battle of Kadesh. The facade of the temple is decorated with four twenty-meter stone statues of the Pharaoh; he sits with his hands folded in his lap. Pharaoh's gaze is directed to the east, towards the sun, because his name means "born of the god Ra". At his feet are small sculptures of members of his large family: wife Nefertari, mother and several children, of whom he had more than 200. The height of the facade of the Big Temple is 31 meters.
The temple consists of four successively decreasing rectangular halls with ancillary side rooms. Everyone was admitted to the first room, nobles in the second, priests to the third. Only the pharaoh and his entourage could enter the last, Small Hall.
A narrow door leads into a semi-dark hall with columns. In its depth, 55 meters opposite the entrance, there is a door to the sanctuary - a low, dark room. There, along the back wall, four sculptures the size of a man's height are carved side by side - a statue of Ramses II himself and the gods Ra, Amon and Pt. The seated figures of the gods are depicted in crowns entwined with urei (sacred cobras). On the walls of the temple, hieroglyphs are preserved - a chronicle of the military campaign to Syria, which the great pharaoh undertook in the fifth year of his reign, including the story of the famous battle of Kadesh.
In fact, as historians believe, in the two-day battle of the Egyptians with the Hittites, only the personal courage of the pharaoh and the reinforcements that came up saved from the destruction of the first. Kadesh was not taken, and as a result, both sides concluded an armistice, after which Ramses II retreated to Egypt.
According to legend, he lived to be 90 years old, of which 67 was the permanent ruler of the largest state at that time. Contrary to countless legends, the life of the pharaoh was not only an endless chain of wars of conquest. His contribution to the development of art and architecture of Ancient Egypt is enormous. Under Ramses II, construction is underway in the temples of Amun in Thebes and Osiris in Abydos; a grandiose memorial complex Ramsesseum is being built on the western bank of the Nile opposite Thebes. In Nubia, which was firmly subordinated to Egypt under Ramses II, temples are being built in his honor. The most famous among them is the rocky temple in Abu Simbel, which is not only a historical and architectural monument, but also a unique engineering structure.
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Every year on October 20, on his birthday, and on February 21, on the anniversary of his accession to the throne, the great Pharaoh Ramses II was supposed to appear to the people in the temple. At this time, one of the solemn ceremonies was performed: a night service in a columnar hall, barely lit by rare lamps.
Priests in white robes. Kneeling people. Smoke from incense burners. Solemn chants. And when all those present, excited to the limit by the long, tense expectation of a miracle, hear the high priest pronounce the sacred formula, conjuring the sun to appear in the darkness, suddenly something incredible happens: exactly at 6 o'clock in the morning, as if indeed obeying the spell of the priest, the sun the beam penetrates the Entrance Portal and illuminates a 65-meter-long tunnel leading to the iconic niche of the Small Hall. The beam, without touching the statue of the god Ptah, lingers for 6 minutes on Amon and Ra, 12 minutes on the statue of the pharaoh, while brightly highlighting the figure of Ramesses himself in the depths of the sanctuary, and his eyes inlaid with rubies flash with an unkind brilliance.
The Egyptian government, wishing to save the masterpieces of the distant past, appealed to UNESCO and other international organizations with a request to save the temples in the flooded zone. Many proposals were received, but the most expedient was the decision to saw the temples of Abu Simbel into pieces and assemble them in a new place 200 meters from the old one, on a 60-meter rock.
Memorial complex Ramsesseum.
Now it is impossible even to consider the junctions of the blocks. The inevitable consequence of the displacement of the temple was a shift in the time of penetration of the sun's rays into the sanctuary. Previously, the face of Ramses was illuminated by the rays of the rising sun on February 21 and October 20, but after the temple was moved to a new place and the height of the location was changed, the direct penetration of the sun's rays inside the temple shifted a day ahead. True, this does not interfere with the holding of the annual mass holiday - the ritual of the sun rising to the face of Ramses II: the sounds of folk instruments and the beat of drums do not stop all night, heralding the coming of the day on which the legendary ruler of Ancient Egypt was born thousands of years ago.