Note sull'episodio
Around 1264 BC Ramesses II had two temples cut into a sandstone cliff in Nubia at the second Nile cataract, a statement of power over a region rich in gold and ivory. The Great Temple's facade holds four seated statues of the pharaoh, each 66 feet tall, with his family carved no higher than his knees. Its axis was set so that twice a year, on dates recorded as October 22 and February 22, the rising sun reached the inner sanctuary and lit Ra-Horakhty, Amun, and the deified Ramesses while leaving Ptah in shadow. The Small Temple, for Hathor and Queen Nefertari, shows her statues at the same height as his. Sand then buried the site until Johann Ludwig Burckhardt spotted a head in 1813 and Giovanni Belzoni dug in 1817.
In 1959 Egypt announced the Aswan High Dam, and Lake Nasser was set to rise up to 200 feet and dissolve the porous sandstone. Proposals ranged from a glass bubble with underwater viewing galleries to an $82 million protective dam to jacking the temples up whole. The Swedish firm VBB won with a plan to cut them apart and rebuild them higher. Behind an 89 foot cofferdam, workers injected epoxy into the stone for seven months, and marble cutters from Carrara used hand saws to slice both temples into 1,036 blocks. The temples were rebuilt 682 feet inland and over 213 feet higher, finished in 1968 ahead of schedule for just over $41 million from 48 countries, an effort that led to the UNESCO World Heritage List.
- Local workers who refused European coins until Belzoni convinced a sheikh they could be traded upriver
- Champollion's thermometer reading of over 125 degrees Fahrenheit inside the buried temple
- 34,000 tons of sand piled against the facade as a cushion while 300,000 tons of cliff above were chipped away
- The face of one Ramesses statue moved separately after its crown was sawn off
- Concrete domes and rubble used to build an artificial mountain over the rebuilt temples