About Abu Simbel

Abu Simbel is a historic site comprising two massive rock cut temples in the village of  Abu Simbel (Arabic: أبو سمبل), Aswan Governorate,Upper Egypt, near the border with Sudan. It lands on the western bank of Lake Nasser, about 230 km southwest of Aswan (about 300 km by road). The twin temples were originally carved out of the mountainside in the 13th century BC, during the 19th Dynasty reign of the Pharaoh Ramesses II. Their huge external rock relief figures of Ramesses II have become iconic. His wife, Nefertari, and children are beside him in smaller figures by his feet. Sculptures inside the Great Temple commemorate Ramesses II’s heroic leadership at the Battle of Kadesh.

As part of International Campaign to save the Monuments of Nubia, people made an artificial hill from a domed structure to house the Abu Simbel Temples, under the supervision of a Polish archaeologist, Kazimierz Michalowski, from the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Arhaeology University of Warsaw.

The Abu Simbel complex, and other relocated temples from Nubian sites such as Philae, Amada, Wadi es Sebua, are part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Great Temple

The Great Temple at Abu Simbel, builders completed it around year 24 of the reign of Ramesses the Great. Firstly it belongs to the gods Amun, Ra Horakhty, and Ptah, as well as to the deified Ramesses himself. It is generally the grandest and most beautiful of the temples commissioned during the reign of Ramesses II, and one of the most beautiful in Egypt.

Small Temple

The temple of Hthor and Nefertari, also people call it the Small Temple.They built it about 100 m northeast of the temple of Ramesses II. And belonged to the goddess Firstly Hathor and Ramesses II’s chief consort, Nefertari. The first time, Akhenaten dedicated a temple to his great royal wife, Nefertiti. The rock-cut facade two groups of colossi that are separated by the large gateway decorated it. The statues, slightly more than 10 m high, are of the king and his queen. On either side of the portal are two statues of the king, wearing the white crown of Upper Egypt.