Aswan has two types of weather: hot and hotter than hell. I wrote that in my notes, and the climate data seems to agree with me. According to WeatherSpark, the average daily high in Aswan is about 42 °C in July, and the hot season lasts five months, from early May to early October.
My other note from Egypt is shorter: overwhelmed with feelings. It is both thrilling and paralysing. It was hard to put into words, which is awkward for someone about to write a thousand of them. What I can name is a satisfaction that comes from a kind of crossing of the centuries, and the sense of standing among witnesses and proof of a history I had only read about.
Most people who think of ancient Egyptian civilization think of the pyramids. Aswan, far to the south, taught me something else: what it costs to keep a ruin.
Who pays to save a temple?
Egypt built the Aswan High Dam to boost agriculture and power. The reservoir behind it, Lake Nasser, was going to drown the monuments of Nubia. UNESCO launched the International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia on 8 March 1960, and it ran until 1980.
The famous case is Abu Simbel, the rock temples carved for Ramesses II in the thirteenth century BCE. From November 1963, workers sliced them into more than a thousand blocks of about thirty tons each, numbered every one, and rebuilt the temples inside an artificial cliff, 64 metres higher and 180 metres further inland. The new Abu Simbel was inaugurated on 22 September 1968. Around fifty countries donated, covering half of a total cost of 80 million US dollars.
One detail changed with the move. Twice a year, on 22 February and again on 22 October, the sun reaches the inner sanctuary of Abu Simbel. Before the relocation, according to The National, the alignment fell on the 21st of both months.
Philae, which the Nile already flooded part of the year, was moved to the higher island of Agilkia between 1972 and 1979. In all, UNESCO counts 22 monuments and complexes saved. Today the stretch from Abu Simbel to Philae is a single World Heritage property of ten component parts, dating from the fifteenth century BCE to the second century CE.
And the people who lived there?
The monuments did not stand in empty land. Nubian villages lay along the same stretch of river. According to the writer Menna Agha, Egypt completed the displacement of all its Nubian villages on 20 June 1964, resettling their inhabitants in the Kom Ombo valley, in a project called New Nubia. Nubians called it Tahgeer, which Agha translates as the site of displacement. Sudanese Nubians were moved to New Halfa. Agha argues that Nubians were not meaningfully consulted, and that the resettlement did not bring the prosperity the state had promised.
Four years and three months separate those two dates: the last Nubian villages in Egypt emptied on 20 June 1964, Abu Simbel reopened on 22 September 1968.
The question did not close with the dam. According to the writer Maja Janmyr, Egypt’s 2014 constitution set out a return to Nubia within ten years. In March 2016, she reported in openDemocracy that parliament had approved a presidential decree designating many of the villages Nubians wish to return to as military areas that should not be populated.
What are ruins for?
Josef Koudelka spent about thirty years photographing nearly 200 ruined sites around the Mediterranean. The text of the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s 2020 exhibition of his Ruines describes the fragment as “the sign of a vanished totality” (my interpretation). I see ruins differently. For me they are a way to reconnect with the past, and a reminder of our greatest creations.
They are also a paradox. They are timeless, and they remind us how fragile everything is. They are silent and full of stories, evidence and riddles. They are allegories of the imperfection of History and of the beauty people can make. To me they still have something sacred and divine about them, across the centuries and millennia. A ruin like Abu Simbel is a victory over passing time, and in this case it came with a bill.
I do not think monuments like these should be glorified, and I do not think they should be ignored. It is up to each of us to interpret them correctly: to learn the message they carry, and the violence done to populations. Aswan makes that hard to avoid. The same stone tells you about a pharaoh, and about the villages that were emptied so that the water could rise.
My photographs of Egypt belong to Long Live the Fallen World, a series on the remains of ancient civilizations, available for editorial and institutional licensing. You can write to me at contact@envelacastel.com, or browse the series in the Heritage section.
