Its presence would help to remind the pharaoh's distant Nubian subjects of his might. 'Never was the like done before.'Ī horde of artisans was required to carve these massive monuments in stone into the rose-colored sandstone cliffs beside the Nile.

'His Majesty commanded the making of a mansion in Nubia by cutting in the mountain,' Abu Simbel was among his most ambitious undertakings. But Ramses II may have built more monuments to himself during his 67-year reign than any other ruler in antiquity. Building ornate tombs and temples to their own memory was always a priority for pharaohs, who were regarded as 'god-kings.' To the Egyptians, these statues represented extensions of their being. to celebrate the thirtieth year of his reign. The famous temples at Abu Simbel, in the southern Egyptian region of Nubia, were built by the pharaoh Ramses II in about 1260 B.C. In the 1960s the temples at Abu Simbel were moved to prevent their submersion as a result of the construction of the Aswan High Dam. Copies of its hieroglyphic inscriptions were used by Jean-Francois Champollion (1790-1832) as he completed deciphering the Egyptian script a few years later.

In 1817 Giovanni Belzoni (1778-1823) began the process of digging away the sand that had hidden most of the site. The great temples of the pharaoh Ramses II at Abu Simbel had been unknown to the West until 1813, when they were visited by the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt (1784-1817).

Pharaoh ramses ii sandstone temples