The temple of Ramesses II,
so let's go take a look. The Great Temple of Abu-Simbel,
built by Ramesses II, is one of the most stupendous
creations of Egyptian architecture, this is farther up the Nile, farther into Nubia in the southernmost of Egypt, and this temple was entirely
excavated out of the solid rock. Cave temples are very rare in Egypt, temples were usually built structures, but just in this area of Nubia
they tend to be more common. So here Ramesses is adapting to the
typical architecture of the region. An entrance forecourt leads to the
imposing façade formed as a pylon, measuring 36 meters wide and 32 meters high, immediately in front of which are four rock-cut
seated colossal statues of Ramesses II, over 20 meters high. The processional spaces that we had leading up to the sanctuary in the other Egyptian
temples are all interiorized here. The pylon itself becomes a carving into the
living rock of the cliff, it's incredible. So you look at the pylon, or the entry
piece carved into the rock of Abu Simbel, and you look at a typologically normative pylon, and you can see that the memory
of this pylon which carries the memory of the mud wall is preserved and used here. And just look at the scale of the statues, the reason why Egyptian architecture is so huge when compared to other ancient
civilizations like Greece, is that the Egyptians made their buildings not
in a human scale, but in a scale for the gods. We're here at the entrance of Abu Simbel temple, and you can see right away how colossal is
the size of the statues in the entrance. The entrance leads to a vestibule, the
ceiling of which is supported by eight pillars depicting the deified Ramesses
linked to the god Osiris. We're in the entrance hall
of the temple of Abu Simbel. The walls have vividly colored reliefs depicting battle scenes in the military
campaigns that Ramesses waged. The most famous relief shows Ramesses
himself on his chariot shooting arrows against his fleeing enemies,
who are being taken prisoner. There are eight smaller chambers in the sides, these were probably used to store
the temple utensils and furniture, adjoin this vestibule, and in the rear is a
small hypostyle hall, having four pillars. Behind this, is a long narrow chamber
out of which are three apartments, the center one being the sanctuary. So these are the same kind of spaces
we were seeing in the mortuary temples. The idea of hypostyle hall though, is transformed
in that the columns are anthropomorphic, that is, they're ornamented with human
figures that are engaged, so we have this avenue of humanoids, and then we
proceed through a telescoping sense of spaces, with lower ceilings and smaller rooms,
getting you deeper and deeper into the temple. It’s been said that Ramses was a man obsessed
with transmitting his own greatness to the world, and of course we cannot deny that he was a
pharaoh with a special taste for scenery. And so in this temple of Abu Simbel
that is excavated in the mountain, an incredibly curious phenomenon occurs: in the sanctuary of this temple, there’s
an altar that supported a sacred boat, and Ramesses himself seated among the
divinities as if he were another god. But the most curious thing is that two
days a year, on October 21 and February 21, two months before and two months
after the winter solstice, the sun penetrates directly into the
heart of the temple of Ramesses II, and the portraits of Amun, Ramesses,
and Ra are illuminated by the sunlight, leaving in the shade the portrait of
Ptah, a dark god, a god of the shadows, a god that has more of a subterranean connotation. Ramesses also ordered the construction of another temple that was bit smaller in
honor of his wife Nefertari, this one is still imitating that characteristic
form of the pylons in the carved façade, and also has colossal statues. Now we're going to enter to
Nefertari's temple, Ramesses' wife. The interior is very similar to the
interior of the temple of Ramesses in that, even though smaller, it has
the same spaces in common, a hypostyle hall with pillars,
this time depicting Hathor, the Egyptian goddess of
femininity and maternal care, who is often represented as a cow, but in these capitals she's represented
as a woman with the ears of a cow. This hypostyle hall also contains
several images and inscriptions, this time with scenes of the queen
and some Egyptian divinities. There's also several small chambers for storage, and a sanctuary in the back with a sacred statue. These temples in Abu Simbel, which today are
one of the best-known Egyptian attractions, in ancient times presented a very different aspect
to that with which we contemplate them today, as you can see the temples were
completely painted, completely polychrome, and stood out so much more than today, because of
the white and the other colors it used to have. These Aswan temples have a
very interesting history: they survived and they were very well preserved
even though they had lost their colors, and one of the statues had broken. But they were severely threatened
by the lake that you see here. This lake did not reach
quite up to here back then, and this temples used to be located about
200m that way, 65m lower into the cliff, but one of the big engineering
projects in the 1960s was the building of the
spectacular Aswan dam on the Nile, the temples of Ramses II and Nefertari
at Abu Simbel got threatened, because the territory around here has got
the lake formed by the making of this dam. This is an image from the 1960s, the
dam had been built for a couple years, and the water did not stop rising, and it had already risen so much that it was about to reach the feet of
the colossi of the temple of Ramses, and what’s worse, the water
was beginning to infiltrate between the stones of the
temple weakening its structure. At that time, a spectacular
international campaign was launched to dismantle stone by stone
all the temples despite the difficulty of being excavated in the mountain, which reveals that the inner
walls of the mountain itself had to be excavated and moved to another location that had to be close but secure enough to
guarantee the preservation of the two temples. Two small artificial mountains made of
concrete, about 65 meters higher over the cliff were built to fit the disassembled temples, and here you can see the actual location
of the temples below the water level today, Hadn't the temples been moved, today they would
be submerged several meters under the water, and here above is the current
location of the two constructions. Also, by repositioning the
temples on these artificial hills, the effect of the solar alignment that made the sun illuminate the statues of
three of the gods twice a year was respected. Here I’ll share with you a panoramic
photograph that I took on site, You can see the two artificial mountains
with the temple of Nefertari to the right, and the temple of Ramesses to the left. When these temples were
discovered in the 19th century, they were all covered with sand
accumulated throughout thousands of years. And it took about a century to remove it all. This is the first photo ever
taken in Abu Simbel in 1854. Abu Simbel was discovered in 1813 by the
same man who discovered Petra a year before, Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt. And it was Giovanni Belzoni, the Italian who discovered the
interior of the pyramid of Chephren, the first one who succeeded to enter the
temple by digging enough sand in 1817. Thank you for watching, if you enjoyed the video
please leave a like because it helps me a lot. Also remember that you can watch all of
my videos from Egypt in this playlist. Thank you again, and I'll see you very soon. Goodbye!
