Getting to
Abu Simbel is not easy. The great rock-hewn temple complex of Ramses II and his favoured wife Nefertari is located 175 miles south of Aswan, a mere 25 miles from the Sudanese border. That's a lot of very sparse terrain to cover. The logistics involved meant that, when faced with the option of visiting the site only four of our company of nine took it up. But I knew of Abu Simbel, and the very idea of visiting Aswan and of not making the effort to go and see one of the most famous ancient monuments in the world was not one that I was prepared to consider for long. Hell, if necessary I would have made the journey on my own!
There are two ways of visiting Abu Simbel. For the cash-rich and time-poor the quickest way is to
fly. Flight time is approx 45 minutes each way and apparently gives superb views over Lake Nasser and the temples before landing. Booking that through the tour company I was there with would have been $170 (85GBP), plus the E£70 entrance fee, and left me with an hour at the site. (You can travel independently, and even stay over night in the nearby hamlet if the idea of a mere three-hour excusrion is not to your taste). For the more time-rich and cash poor you can travel overland, which is what I plumped for. This cost only $25, plus the E£70 entrance fee. However, to beat the midday heat this meant that I had to wake at 3:30 am, ready for our hired minibus to join a
convoy at 4:30 for the three hour drive south.
Convoy you say? I admit I did have notions when I heard that of vans nose to tail speeding south into bandit territory with armed outriders to provide security. In practice this is not the case. Following the massacre of tourists at Luxor in 1997, the Egyptian government became slightly paranoic: they simply want to know where all tourists are at any one time should anything happen. As a result we rarely saw other traffic en route, and the only police we saw were at isolated roadside stations.
Arriving at Abu Simbel at around 7.30 you find yourself in the carparks around the back of the hilltop holding the temples. Progressing into the compound you can circle around the mount to the plaza before Lake Nasser. Here you get your first view of the two temples - the Sun Temple of Ramses II to the left, the
Hathor Temple of Queen Nefertari to the right. On both an entrance way is flanked by tall statues, standing proud of the rock face. These hills are not natural, but rather scuplted with funds from UNESCO to resemble the cliffs in which the temples were originally set, and which now lie under the sparkling waters of Lake Nasser.
Ramses' Sun Temple is the more impressive. Two monumental figures of the pharoah sit either side of the temple entrance, each twenty metres tall. Even today the fine features of lips, ears, eyes and pharaonic head-dress are crisp and clear, having been preserved beneath the sands until the 19th century. Ramses sits, gazing over his domains. The edifice was clearly meant to instil the fear of God (the deified god Ramses that is - he dwarfs the carved images of gods which accompany him)into his conquered Nubian vassals as well as exalt the greater glory of the pharaoh. The statue second from the left lies shattered, its torso and head lying on the ground following an earthquake early in the Roman rule of Egypt; UNESCO made the decision to leave the ruins in situ rather than reconstructing them. Wanderluster is quite right when she writes that one's first thought is of the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem
'Ozymandias':
"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read". There is dispute about which particular statue of Ramses II inspired this work, but I note that the year of its composition (1817) was also the year that the archaeologist Belzoni excavated Abu Simbel. However, gazing upon the face of Ramses I would describe his expression not as a 'sneer of cold command', but rather a wry smirk, almost as though he appreciated the irony that the greatest monument to his reign would be buried by the sands of time and forgotten.
Closer to, passing through the crowds you are able to see signs of earlier visitors marring the surface: 'W Collins, Rifles', 'Sapper W. E. Davis', testament of a later empire and army that passed by to crush the restless natives to the south. The story of Ramses' miltary campaigns is told within, a storyboard of the great pharaoh smiting his foes. He really seemed keen on the whole smiting thing. One Australian woman popped her head around a pillar to survey the walls. "Nah, more of the same" was her pithy summation. And indeed, the reliefs were executed purely in monochromatic stone, with none of the startling colour that was to characterise the Nile temples up towards Luxor.
At the rear is the sanctuary, where the fingers of dawn's light used to illuminate the statues of Ramses on February 22 and October 22 (the pharoah's birthday and coronoation date respectively), though with the reconstruction this effect now occurs a day later. Annoyingly, my visit occurred a week too late. However, I do not think it would be possible to get there for dawn unless you were staying overnight. Certainly for me dawn occurred at some point during our three hour drive south.
So, Abu Simbel. Awkward to get to, but certainly worthwhile. My praise is not altogether critical however. The somewhat pristine plaza before the temples, and the swarm of tourists do distract from the effect. The reconstructed statues are somehow too clean - reminding you that they were built in this location merely forty years previously. And while one can marvel at the story of their construction, and again at the story of their reconstruction, I was constantly reminded that what I was looking at was purely a tourist attraction, and hence felt maybe just a touch 'plastic'. Still, hell of a tourist attraction!
From journal Frontier of the Pharoahs