Egypt: Aswan and Abu Simbel
Temples, Villages, Monasteries, and Islands
Our cruise ended in Aswan. This riverside city in southern Egypt is famous for its dam—you know the one: built in the 1960s, formed Lake Nasser, displaced ~60-100 thousand people,* contributed to Cold War tensions**—which doesn’t exactly bring to mind idyllic river town, but turns out Aswan is exactly that!
Aswan was a critical trading and border defense town in antiquity, and the stone that builds countless temples, shrines, and even the pyramids was sourced from nearby. We stayed on Elephantine Island, a holy island once believed to be the dwelling place of the ram-headed god Khnum, god of the cataracts who controls the waters of the Nile. Today, Elephantine is a center of Nubian culture, and felt much more chill than the rest of Egypt.
From the island we hired a boat man for the day to take us across to the west bank of the Nile, where we climbed a sand dune to a 7th century monastery. Though not as old or as colorful as the Ancient Egyptian temples (7th century?! pah! so new!), this was an amazing ruin that you could climb around and explore was pretty cool! If it were in just about any other country, it would probably be a major tourist attraction with the crowds to prove it, but in a country filled to the brim with even major-er attractions, we had it almost all to ourselves.
We then headed upriver to a “traditional” Nubian village. (Somewhat confusingly, upriver/Upper Nile/Upper Egypt means south because the Nile flows south to north.) I am confident that the elaborate spice/jewelry/statue/clothing shops, camel rides, and insanely colorfully painted buildings are not actually “traditional” in the strictest sense. But it was fun! Like a warm and friendly Nubian Disneyland. And Nubian buildings are indeed much more colorful than other buildings in Egypt.
To bum you out with reality for a second, the Egyptian government forcibly displaced tens of thousands of Nubians when the Aswan Dam was built (see footnote), flooding the lands they’d inhabited for thousands of years. Nubians call this “the bitter occurrence” and are still advocating for the promised right of return. Ancient Nubians ruled Egypt from 747 BCE to 656 BCE; the Kingdom of Kush at its largest stretched from modern Khartoum (Sudan) to Alexandria (Egypt). [Yes I made us go to the Nubian Museum.]
From Aswan we took a 4-hour bus to Abu Simbel, even further south (look at it on a map, it’s basically Sudan!). In yet another successfully navigated but very tricky bit of Egypt tourism, they push you hard toward visiting Abu Simbel on a minibus day trip from Aswan, leaving at 4am with all the other tourists. This tour requires getting up too early, seeing the temples with a huge crowd, and paying to submit your passport in advance for a permit. After thoroughly exploring this option (including misquoted prices, an inexplicable free horse carriage ride, and a total waste of time at a tourism office), we opted instead for the once-a-day bus (no permit required?!) and to stay overnight in Abu Simbel. So much better and so much damn-near-impossible-to-figure-out-it-exists!
We arrived in the early afternoon to have the two temples—one dedicated to the Pharaoh Ramesses II and the god Ra, and the other dedicated to his Queen Nefertiti and the god Hathor—pretty much to ourselves.
The Great Temple was completed in 1265 BCE, and all four 66-foot statues outside depict Ramesses (narcissist much?). The smaller temple is the second temple in Ancient Egypt to be dedicated to a queen, and is one of very few instances in which the statues of the king and his consort are equal in size. Queen statues are usually knee-high to kings’ statues, as in the entrance to the Great Temple, but all six statues outside of the smaller temple (of Ramesses and Nefartari) are the same height.
Abu Simbel is particularly insane because when the High Dam was built, UNESCO literally moved two whole temples, which had been carved into a rock cliff next to the river over 3,200 years ago, 60 meters straight up. The temples today are built into artificial hollow mountains, facing the same direction at the same angle as the originals. A little museum at the site explains the reconstruction process and it is truly mind blowing. (Here’s a 2-minute video if you’re curious.)
We went through a lot of effort to get to “just another temple” (in the words of a Spanish guy we met in Aswan who chose not to get himself to Abu Simbel), but it was totally worth it.
—
* The total displaced people is really difficult to determine. I found a source saying that 50,000 Nubains were displaced in Egypt, another saying 40,000 were displaced in Sudan, and a general claim of 100,000 that I can’t find a reasonable source for…I’m guessing someone added the numbers from each country? Demographic data in Egypt and Sudan in the 1960s was, unsurprisingly, not great. According to this very cool story map, “Data is very old and spotty when it comes to the number of people that were displaced. However, all of our sources cite over 60,000 people were displaced, many claim they were all Nubian, while others believe that the Nubians were only a piece of this great migration North.”
** Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, starting a short war (called the Suez Crisis, or Second Arab-Israeli War, or Tripartite Aggression, or Sinai War) in which Israel, Britain, and France attacked Egypt, and the Soviet Union, US, and UN pressured them to withdraw, ending with the first UN peacekeeping operation. The dam was ultimately built with Egyptian money (from revenues from the Canal) and Russian funding.