Position 96 - Looking Up The River Across The Front Of The Abu Simbel Temple, From The Sand Drift At The North

No adequate impression of this gigantic temple can be obtained from any one point of view; we must view it from several different standpoints in succession before it is possible to get from it what it is capable of giving us; for as we move from point to point its beauty and its grandeur gradually fill us with a wonder and an admiration which are not easily put into words. It is unique; no other building conveys just such an impression. The grand old times which produced it are not so familiar to us as the history of Rome; we are not overwhelmed by a rush of familiar memories here, as when we stand beneath the shadow of the Coliseum.

The age that brought forth this noble monument lies back of the great drama of Europe; it belongs to the prelude, without which the subsequent scenes of European history could not have been enacted. The chisel that wrought this colossal work left an inheritance of technical conquest, which brought to the architects of Europe an unconscious superiority over mere material difficulties, insuring fancy and imagination, urtrammeled liberty to revel in beautiful conceptions, which might then be embodied in stone with a fleetness and a confident facility begotten and born of the very fingers that shaped these mighty statues before us.

Viewed in their proper light, such works as these should arouse in us a feeling of the profoundest gratitude to the ancient people who developed the arts inherited by later Europe, and make of Egypt not merely the name of a vanished people, but the synonym for a debt which we can never pay.

We stand here on the sand, which sifts in continually on the north side from the desert behind the cliffs, land threatens to engulf the temple. It has been several times cleared away, and can be kept out only by the closest vigilance. We look southward across the temple front with the river on our left and the desert on the right (Plan 19). This point shows us better than any other, the court before the entrance. The face of the cliff has been excavated for some distance in order to obtain the necessary depth for the great statues. All that great excavation of the rock, a hundred feet high, was done for the most part with bronze chisels. This court is enclosed by a low balustrade running along in front of the statues and parallel with the façade of the temple.

From here you can see the other end of this balustrade just beyond the fragments of the fallen colossus, toward the outer edge of the further side of the excavation. It was adorned with small statues of the king, and with figures of the sacred hawk, of which you may see one that has been removed to the base of the fallen colossus. The legs of the further two colossi bear a number of Phoenician, Greek and Carian inscriptions, one of which, on the legs of the fallen colossus, is of great interest, being among the oldest known Greek inscriptions. It was placed there by soldiers of King Psamtik, probably the second, of the 26th Dynasty, early in the 6th century B. C. Here, then, is a monument from the beginnings of Greek influence in Egypt, which culminated in a series of Greek kings of Egypt, the Ptolemies, whose monuments we have so often seen.

The northernmost of the four colossi is hidden behind the projecting rock on our right, but you can here compare the next one very well with the southernmost at the other end. You see in it again the characteristic features of Ramses II, as we found them in the two figures at this end. Above the statues is a horizontal line of large hieroglyphics, just below the cornice. It contains in duplicate the pompous titulary of Ramses II, which begins in the middle and reads both ways.

The hollow of the cornice above has largely fallen down. It bears a row of cartouches, or royal ovals, containing the name of the king and enclosed within the folds of the sacred uraeus serpent. At the top is the line of sacred dog-headed apes crowning the whole. These animals were especially connected with sun-worship, and hence we find them here facing the rising sun, with forepaws raised in adoration.

Beyond the further projection of the rock is disclosed a long reach of the river, up which we look toward the second cataract, forty miles away. In its original bright colors, framed in the sombre gray and brown of the sandstone cliffs, with the blue river beyond, how striking the effect of this temple front must have been! But we can spend no more time on the exterior; for we have still to view the halls within. We shall stand just within the entrance clown between the statues, and look back to the inner sanctuary of the temple chiseled into the heart of the cliff. See the lines numbered 97 on Plan 19.