ABU SIMBEL, Egypt — In the 1960s, rising waters from a new dam threatened to submerge the temples and monuments of Nubia, the ancient home of black pharaohs in Egypt’s far south.
To preserve them, the antiquities were dismantled, moved and reconstructed. Today, most of the surviving monuments can be seen only from the lake created by the waters that nearly destroyed them.
Cruises on the 300-mile-long Lake Nasser, one of the largest manmade lakes in the world, include stops to visit nearly a dozen of the temples.
Four-day trips are offered on a pair of elegant cruise ships, the Eugenie and the Kasr Ibrim, that hark back to a golden age of 1920s travel in Egypt and carry more than just a whiff of an Agatha Christie novel.
For tourists, the lake’s vast waters are also a welcome respite from the din of Egypt’s teeming cities and offer a contrast to the intensely farmed verdant fields of the Nile Valley.
The biggest highlights, however, are the trips to the rescued temples along the way. Guests clamber aboard motor launches and dart across the lake to the ruins.
Many date from the time of Ramses the Great, Egypt’s megalomaniacal pharaoh, who filled the Nile Valley with statues of himself in the 13th century B.C., culminating in the colossi of Abu Simbel.
Ramses was only the latest Egyptian pharaoh to invade and subjugate Nubia, carrying off its gold, ivory and cattle, but also recruiting its men for his armies.
At the Beit al-Wali temple near the High Dam, he filled the walls with carvings of his victories over the Nubians, his chariots trampling defeated armies and lopping off enemy heads.
Farther south at Ramses’ Wadi el-Seboua temple, which includes an avenue of sphinxes at the entrance, history has left other signs. Crosses carved in the wall and paintings of St. George above the altar speak of the arrival of Christianity to the deep south.
Egypt experienced massive persecutions by the Roman Empire, culminating in A.D. 284 with Emperor Diocletian’s “Time of Martyrs” that so scarred the Christians that the Egyptian Church now dates its calendar to it.
Many Christians fled to remote monasteries in the desert or deep into Nubia to escape the reach of the Romans and they converted the old temples into churches, often defacing the images of the old gods even as they worshipped in their shadow.
The temple of Kalabsha near Aswan and the Dakka temple farther south are interesting as well because they date to Egypt’s Greek and Roman periods about 1,000 years after the heyday of the pharaohs.
Mindful of the culture of the country they were occupying, the Ptolemaic and Roman overlords closely mimicked the ancient styles and honored the old gods, with a few improvements.
Greek-trained craftsmen carved the familiar Egyptian deities in the more contemporary bas-relief style with more physical detail, yielding beautiful wall carvings that have now been artfully lighted from below.
The ancient Egyptians often covered temple walls with plaster and carved into it, an easier method that did not, however, stand the test of time.
One exception, though, is the Amada temple, one of the oldest in Nubia dating back 3,400 years to the 18th Dynasty’s Thutmosis III. It hosts a particularly fine collection of plaster carvings that posed a real dilemma to the French engineers who had to save it in the 1960s.
Afraid the carvings would be damaged if they took the temple apart like the others, the French ended up carefully chipping it out of its rock base and sliding it along on rails for 1.5 miles at a rate of about 100 feet a day.
After contemplating such wonders under a blazing sun, it is a relief to return to the cool environment of the cruise ship, where passengers are greeted with ice cold towels and drinks in the main lounge.
If you go …
Lake Nasser cruises: www.eugenie.com.eg or www.kasribrim.com.eg.
Four- or five-day cruises on Egypt’s Lake Nasser can be taken on Fridays and Saturdays from Aswan, or on Mondays and Wednesday from Abu Simbel, depending on which ship you choose.
Tickets are about $850 during high season, which starts in October and can be booked on the website or through a travel agent. Or contact Belle Epoque Travel, 011-202-2516- 9649.
The massive statues of Abu Simbel can also be visited by airplane.
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