Aswan High Dam
We went over the 2.5 mile dam in the dark on our way south to Abu Simbel, and stopped to see it on our way back. The dam was built between January 9, 1969 and January 15, 1971, creating Lake Nasser. The lake is up to 750 feet deep, 7 miles wide and 200 miles long in Egypt (and 200 more miles long in Sudan). Thousands of crocodiles are in the lake, the furthest extent north they now live. Fishing is a big industry, with Nile perch and tilapia being popular. There are no resorts on the lake. In the summer, it can be 113’ F in the shade!
There were three seasons in ancient Egypt: flooding, growing and harvest seasons. Each one is four months long. Each month was 30 days, and each week 10 days. There were 5 religious days in addition to the 360 days already accounted for. Floods were something that people head to deal with every year, some years being worse than others. People started thinking of controlling those floods some in the late 1800s.
The Old Aswan Dam was built in 1898 on the first cataract (rocky area) of the Nile. There are many other cataracts south of this point, the last being Victoria Falls. The old dam was 1.4 miles long and 185 feet high, with 180 20-foot wide gates. It’s still an active dam.
In the middle part of the last century, Egypt took on large projects to show their power. An example of this is the Suez Canal that was built by a French and British company in 1869. It was supposed to own the canal for 99 years (the British have something about owning things for 99 years?) Egypt was invaded by Israel, France and Britain after it claimed to nationalize the canal in 1956 (the Suez War). After the few month war, it was nationalized when the US had brokered a deal to keep the colonizers out.
Built not too long after, the 111 meter fall High Dam added security from annual flooding, created a larger water storage system and made hydropower. They asked for international help to build it but didn’t get as much as they wanted. Ships used to go through locks in the Old Aswan Dam, but the High Dam doesn’t have locks and ships on both sides can only go as far as the dam. On the dam, there the Monument of Friendship between Egypt and the USSR that is in the abstract form of a lotus.
During a its building, 22 temples were saved by UNESCO. Four temples were given away to the Netherlands, Spain, Italy and the Metropolitan Museum in NY. A Roman Temple was moved 30 miles downstream to near the dam. 42 Nubian villages were covered in water, displacing 250,000 people.
At 540 feet, they open the spillway at the dam. When we were there, it was at 400 feet. The Aswan Airport is a military airport, since it’s a strategic area.
We had a long drive from Aswan down to Abu Simbel, just 30k from the border with Sudan. Between the two lies much desert and a canal to control the river and irrigate fields. The spillway is to let water off Lake Nasser if it’s a high flood season in central Africa. The canal is 320 miles long. The spillway was full after last flood season. Lake Nasser is 6th largest manmade lake in the world.
Mubarak, the leader until 2011, claimed he was going to do a ‘large project’ that would change the economy and reclaim the land here. It cost a lot because of soil there; it’s hard to reclaim the desert for agriculture.
There was a wall along the road as we got closer to Abu Simbel; the farmland behind it owned by the military. Saudi, Kuwaiti and Emerati businessmen are buying up lots of land. Construction in this remote, sparse area has increased in the past year.
Abu Simbel
Abu Simbel is a famous temple that was built by Rameses II 3300 years ago. He built it in the land of his enemies that he had conquered to show the Nubians that he had control.
In 1813, a German archeologist found a large buried temple. A small bit was visible, and then he saw the colossal heads.
When the Aswan High Dam was being planned, UNESCO made a call to save at least some of the temples before the waters rose. Abu Simbel temples were considered the most important and largest temples that would be affected, and they were also made of poor quality sandstone that had barely been touched by the destructive waters. They started to save it in 1963, surrounding the temples with coffer dams as the waters started to rise. They cut the temples into pieces with sand saws – 1036 pieces that were 20-30 tons each. It was carved out of one piece of stone and there was danger that in putting the pieces back together they would crush each other because they had not dealt with the weight of the other ‘pieces’ in the past.
They chose the new site based on how high Lake Nasser was supposed to get. The temples were moved 200 feet higher and 700 feet inland from the original location. There was a reinforced concrete structure around each temple. A mountain was engineered as a background like it had looked before. The completion of the move was in 1968. The temples as well as the other Nubian temples all the way to Philae) were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List.
The larger temple is famous for its engineering to of the ‘miracle of the sun;’ with sunlight going down the main axis and lighting up three of the four gods at the back wall of the temple at sunrise for 20 minutes two days a year. The fourth god, Ptah, is the god of darkness, so the sun never touched him. The other gods are Amun-Ra, the sun god, Rameses II deified, and Ra-Horakhty, another sun god (a falcon with a sun disc overhead). Now, those dates are February 21 (the kings birthday) and October 22 (the day of his coronation).
Some other special things about this temple:
⁃ it took up to 20 years to build.
⁃ One colossal statue crumbled during an earthquake in antiquity
⁃ Below the colossal statues the family of of Rameses II’s can be standing at their feet
⁃ it has the only depiction in all of a Egypt of someone riding a horse in battle.
⁃ the 20 baboon statues on top of the temple are looking to the rising sun. The cry of the baboons cry was said to welcome the morning sun.
⁃ the sacred boat of Amun-Ra has a ram at the front of the boat
⁃ the large temple has 8 Osiris statues, all with a mummy of Rameses II. Four have the crown of the south and four have the two crowns showing a unified Egypt.
The Small Temple was built by Rameses II for his wife Nefertari and Hat-hor, the goddess of fertility, motherhood, love and music. Four of the 6 statues outside are Rameses II and two of them are Nefertari, an honor where she was made the almost the same size as him, showing his love and her royal status. It is the only place where you can find depictions of a king and queen together at a temple in Egypt.
Nubian village
We visited a Nubian village, on the southern side of Aswan; we took a motorboat there. Nubia is in Southern Egypt and Northern Sudan. Nubi mean the land of go. The Nubian people are 8,000 strong, and more are throughout Egypt and beyond because of the diaspora when the High Dam was built.
The traditional color to paint homes is light blue, the color of the sky. They have dome-shaped rooms that help heat to rise and are natural air conditioning. There’s an opening on the north and south sides of the room/home for a breeze. Homes have 2-3 levels tall with an entrance from the desert as well as the Nile. Each bedroom has a bathroom/toilet, a place to sit inside for rain… one time every few years, and a stone bench outside of the home. Homes that face east/west cost less and don’t have a breeze. People often have baby crocodiles in their homes, they are a tourist draw at the very least, and people historically lived with them before the dam was put in.
Kids learn Nubian (which is not written), Arabic and English in school here. Some do focus on another language from Europe (French, German, Italian or Spanish). A teacher met us and .. went through the Arabic alphabet (I don’t say taught because we didn’t really pick it up). It is written from right to left, the opposite of English and most other European languages. The most interesting thing to me was the Arabic numbers (which we use)… that each number, 0-9 actually has that number of angels in it if written a certain way. People who speak Arabic actually don’t use Arabic numerals, so I was out of luck reading anything.
The habits and traditions of Nubian people are disappearing and changing. People used to marry only within a village. There are Nubians who have not intermixed with others much at all in Sudan. In Egypt, Nubians are mixed and lighter skinned. In 1805-1849, some Nubians mixed with Albanians, they are the lightest and have lighter colored eyes. There is no racial discrimination against Nubians. They have modern conveniences like phones, water supply and electricity. The largest industries are fishing, tourism, agriculture and building boats. Our last stop was in the market in Aswan where many good spices are sold!
Adventures of Anna 
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