The rescue of Abu Simbel, 1963-1968
As soon as the Aswan High Dam started to hold back the waters of the Nile, the
temples cut into the rock at Abu Simbel were threatened and might have sunk
under the rising water. Help arrived in the form of UNESCO, which placed a
contract with HOCHTIEF to rescue the temples, under the eyes of the whole
world, in a race against time and against the rising water. First a dam 1,200
feet long was built to protect the two temples. But then, in November 1964,
success threatened to slip out of the hands of the men working feverishly on
the project: the waters of the Nile had risen to a level barely six feet short
of the crown of the dam. Applying every possible technical means and with
incredibly hard work the team managed to ward off the danger and bring the
dam up to the level that the Nile water could not reach before the work was
completed.
The next job was to remove a hill 200 feet high from above the temples. To
do this the porous sandstone was stabilized with injections of artificial resin,
whilst the façades were buried in desert sand to protect the colossal statues
from falling rocks.
Only now could the experts go to work and saw the solidified stone apart extremely carefully into blocks weighing up to 30 tons. A total of 1,041 blocks were numbered in a sophisticated system, transported on trucks to a point 220 feet higher and 600 feet further inland, and then reassembled in the reverse order. Now the temples look as if they always had been standing there.
