F or many, the two temples of Abu Simbel are a testament to the power and passion of Ramses II, the pharaoh who ruled Ancient Egypt for most of the twelfth century BC. For others, the ancient legacy is overshadowed by the engineering feat performed to rescue the colossal structures from the rising waters of Lake Nasser, created by the construction of the Aswan High Dam.

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia, launched by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) at the request of the Egyptian Ministry of Culture and the Sudanese Ministry of Culture, Sports and Youth. Between 1959 and 1980, thousands of archeologists, engineers, architects and manual laborers worked frantically to document and rescue the antiquities in the path of the growing lake. A total of 22 monuments and architectural complexes between Aswan, Egypt, and Khartoum, Sudan, were relocated with the assistance of 40 technical missions from five continents.

Consultant engineer and architect Medhat Abdel Rahman Ibrahim was on the renowned international team that succeeded in dismantling and relocating the legendary rock-cut temples of Abu Simbel, the site that has come to symbolize the success of UNESCO’s Nubian Campaign.

After earning his bachelor’s degree in architecture from Helwan University, Ibrahim, a Cairo native, had only been working for a year when he received a call from the Ministry of Culture asking him to go to Abu Simbel as one of the supervising engineers for the project. The team was tasked with moving not one, but two structures: the Great Temple with four 13-meter-tall colossi of Ramses II carved out of the rock face, and the smaller temple built as a token of love for the Pharaoh’s favored wife Nefertari.

Starting in 1963, it took the team five years of “hard work, day and night” to save Abu Simbel. The project was an international collaboration: Egyptians, Germans, French, Swedes and Italians all worked together. “The work was done in three shifts, rotating every eight hours,” Ibrahim recalls. “Everyone had a specific role and specialization, with up to 3,000 workers from the different missions cooperating and supporting one another.”

Courtesy Eng. Medhat Abdel Rahman Ibrahim Before the town of Abu Simbel was built, Ibrahim and the other project workers lived on boats next to the temple site.

When the project first started, the team had to live in boats until houses could be built for them to stay in. “We supervised workers in building a Nubian village, where staff houses were designed to have the air enter from the north and south to allow for natural ventilation inside,” Ibrahim explains. “We also supervised the building of a museum, a hotel called Nefertari that is still there today, a police station, a post office and an administrative office for the staff.”

Moving a temple that was carved into the side of a mountain safely to a new place was not an easy job. “We had to study and discuss all kinds of issues with the different experts working on the project to ensure we rebuilt it again safely with all the same measurements,” he says.

“We had to surround the two temples with a barrier to prevent the water from coming inside while we were working on the project. Sometimes, as the lake rose behind the new dam, water would get into our site, but we used pumps to send it back to Lake Nasser.”

The project moved the temples to a plateau 70 meters higher than their old site, and not a moment too soon, Ibrahim notes. “Actually, almost as soon as we had moved Abu Simbel to its new location, its old site was underwater.”

The next challenge was reassembling the two temples while precisely preserving the buildings’ measurements and orientation. “Since the temple was originally built inside a mountain, we wanted the new one to be the same. After the temple was moved and laid on its foundations, we had to essentially build a mountain over it. It was not an easy job, especially since we were afraid that it might collapse onto the temple,” recalls Ibrahim. “We had to create an artificial dome just to surround the temple from all sides, and then put the sand all over it to make it look like a mountain.”

Courtesy Eng. Medhat Abdel Rahman Ibrahim Ibrahim (far right) and his Egyptian government colleagues in front of the partially reconstructed temples at the new site.

The four colossal statues on the façade of Ramses’ temple posed their own special challenges. “In order to move the statues, we had to cut them into smaller pieces so they could be carried easily. We took care when choosing where to cut, so as not to affect their original beauty,” explains Ibrahim. “When you see the statues today you would never imagine that they had been broken down and moved; they still have the same charm with no signs of any cuts.”

When the team was not working, they found other ways to enjoy their time. “At night, we all used to gather our families together and relax,” recalls Ibrahim, “After a while, you could see that the children had begun to learn a little of each others languages. I believe Abu Simbel united us in an international village.”

After the temple relocation project finished in 1968, Ibrahim went on to establish a distinguished international career working for organizations in Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

In March, Ibrahim was called back to Nubia, this time to commemorate the golden jubilee of the project’s birth at a four-day conference. UNESCO invited the consultants, engineers, contractors and all those involved with saving the temple to a special celebration at the Nubia Museum in Aswan.

“It was a good chance to have all those from the international team that worked on saving the temples reunited and to celebrate in the same place after all this time,” says Ibrahim.

Coordinated by the Ministry of Culture, UNESCO and the Sudanese Ministry of Culture, Sports and Youth, the celebration combined lectures, discussions and folk dancing. It was a VIP-laden event, with Dr. Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Dr. Tarek Shawki, regional director of UNESCO, and Aswan Governor Mostafa Ahmed El-Sayyed on hand to honor all those who participated in the project with commemorative awards.

It was more than just a celebration: the March conference also followed up on UNESCO’s Nubian Campaign with discussions on the impact of Nubian culture in society today and how to preserve this region’s special heritage. Other topics covered included cooperation with the Nubian community and the preservation of the Nubian language. Nubians who had been resettled during the High Dam project were also invited to the event.

For Ibrahim, it was also a chance to reconnect with a region he first experienced a half-century ago. “Along with a group of experts who were invited to the event, I went across to the other side of the lake where the Nubian people live, and had the chance to spend a night with them, sharing their rituals and experiencing their culture.”

The following day, the team was taken for a visit to Abu Simbel. “We went for a tour inside the temple to observe whether time had had any impact on the reconstruction that was done in the 1960s,” says Ibrahim. “It was a fantastic opportunity to get together again and see the result of our endeavors 40 years earlier. While we were at the temple, some people were wondering: Did our efforts really succeed? Our success has endured nature’s tribulations for 40 years — only time will tell if it continues to do so.” et

Engineer Medhat Ibrahim explains how to save a colossal templeI n 1954, under President Gamal Abdel Nasser, planning began on the construction of a second, larger dam across the Nile at Aswan, as the first, built by the British in 1889, was no longer sufficient. Although work would not commence until 1960, the Aswan High Dam’s construction would create the world’s largest artificial lake, Lake Nasser, submerging a host of ancient Nubian monuments in the process.

In 1959, both the Egyptian Ministry of Culture and the Sudanese Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports appealed to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for help in saving the monuments from being lost forever; UNESCO, in turn, spearheaded the International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia, calling for donations and expertise from around the world.

The project to dismantle and relocate Egypt’s Nubian antiquities ran from 1960 to 1968, including those at Abu Simbel, Wadi El-Sebua, Derr, Amada, Qasr Ibrim, Gerf Husain, Debod, Taffa, Kalabsha, Beit El-Wali, Pennout, Dendur, Dakka and Maharraqa. The rescue of the temples on Philae Island, between the Aswan and High dams, was carried about between 1972 and 1979, after the Lake Nasser phase of the campaign was complete.

Including the rescue efforts in Sudan, a total of 22 monuments and architectural complexes were relocated with the assistance of 40 technical missions from five continents.

Consultant engineer and architect Medhat Abdel Rahman Ibrahim, one of the Egyptians working on the Abu Simbel project, describes how the UNESCO team saved the two 3000-year-old temples built by Pharaoh Ramses II around 1240 BC. Edited excerpts:

The temples of Abu Simbel had been constantly threatened by rising waters since the construction of the High Dam. Every day, the waters moved closer and closer to submerging these structures cut into the mountainside.

In order to preserve these and other antiquities in Lake Nasser’s path, an international team of experts, under the auspices of UNESCO, began working on a project to move many of the monuments to higher ground.

The first task at Abu Simbel was to build an approximately 700-meter-long temporary cofferdam around the two temples to keep the waters back from the site. Then, the temple façades were covered with sand to protect them while the mountain around them was being excavated. To access the interior of the temples during this time, workers had to pass through large culvert pipes.

Bulldozers were used to begin carving away the mountain, but for safety reasons they had to stop when excavations reached a designated distance from the temple roofs and walls. Engineers used lighter machinery to take them within 70 centimeters of the temple structures; here they began using electric saws and then switched to handsaws for the last 10 centimeters.

The same saws were then used to carefully cut the temples into blocks weighing between 20 and 30 tons each. The blocks were numbered and two holes drilled into each one, into which steel bars were attached with epoxy resin to make the block easier to transport. The larger temple, dedicated to Ramses II, was cut into 800 blocks approximately and the smaller, dedicated to the Pharaoh’s most beloved wife Nefertari, into approximately 200 blocks.

Each piece was carefully lifted by crane and put on trucks to be transported up to the new location on a plateau located 70 meters higher and set 200 meters back from the water. The detailed carvings in the ancient stones were wrapped in rubber to protect them during the transition.

The most important element of the entire project was to align the temples so that the sun would touch the face of Ramses II inside his temple on October 21, the anniversary of Ramses’ ascension to the throne, and on February 21, the occasion of his birthday. After surveyors had determined the precise angle to orient the buildings and a reinforced concrete foundation had been laid, workers started to reassemble the temple walls and ceilings, using the block numbers as a guide.

Once the interiors had been reconstructed, the outer surfaces of the blocks, hewn from the living rock, were covered with 80 centimeters of reinforced concrete. To support the weight of the man-made hill that would be created over the temples, the UNESCO team built one of the world’s largest artificial domes out of reinforced concrete, reaching a thickness of 1.4 meters on top and 2.1 meters along the foundations.

Finally, the seams in the temple façades and inner walls were filled in with epoxy resin and rock dust collected during the carving process, giving the surfaces a natural, uncut look.