This village is at the southern end of Lake Nasir and is also the site of a temple that was moved when the lake was formed. King Ramesses image is that of a god and so the Nubians built this temple as a memorial to Ramesses II who ruled 1260-1250 BC. It depicts four great gods of Egypt - Ptah - the god of darkness, Amun the Sun god, Ramesses as a god and Horus the falcon headed god. A smaller temple next to this also honors the gods and tells the story of the Nubian wars.
There are three miracles about this large temple. One is the enormity of the statues. Two is the overall scale of the building and three is the perfectly carved statues inside the temple. Those statues of the four gods are in the third room. On Oct. 21 and Feb 21 when the Sun rises, the light first lands on Amun, then moves to encompass Rameses, and finally Horus is lit. Since Ptah is the god of darkness, the light never lands on him. When the temple was moved to higher ground to avoid flooding the dates changed by one day in Oct. and Feb but the Sun still lights up the third room.
In modern times the fourth miracle could be made for the move of the temple complex. If not moved it would have been under 265 feet of water! They cut the large temple into 600 plus huge blocks and the small temple into 300 plus blocks. They built a mountain side and inserted the temples exactly the way they were so that the Sun still lights up the god statues.
We flew back to Aswan after only 2 hours in Abu Simbel, had a 2 hour layover then flew to Cairo. Our last night in Egypt. We had a Lebanese feast, said goodbye to our guide Ahmed and to our fellow tourist, took a short stroll around the largest shopping mall in Cairo to get a feel for how the rich live here and called it an early night.
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