Abu Simbel, Egypt · Travel Poster

Not just a view, the heritage behind it. Ella writes about the place, its hidden history, and the details that never make it into the guidebooks, all printed on the poster.

Everyone comes to Abu Simbel for the four colossal Ramesses II seated at the front, each one the height of a house, staring out across the desert as they have for more than three thousand years, and almost nobody is told what happens inside on two mornings a year. Deep at the very back of the temple, some sixty metres in through the rock, sit four statues in a row: Ptah, Amun, a deified Ramesses himself, and Ra-Horakhty. Twice a year, around 21 February and 21 October, the rising sun threads straight down that long dark corridor and lands on the faces of three of them, lighting Amun, Ramesses and Ra-Horakhty for about twenty minutes while the whole desert holds still. Here is the part I love. The fourth god, Ptah, lord of the underworld and of darkness, is left deliberately in shadow, and the sun never touches him, not once, in all those centuries. The alignment was so exact that when the whole temple had to be sawn into blocks and lifted to higher ground in the 1960s, to save it from the rising waters of Lake Nasser behind the Aswan High Dam, the engineers could not quite reproduce it perfectly, and the sunlit mornings slipped by a day. The guidebooks tell you how big the pharaohs are and move you on to the boat. They rarely tell you that a temple carved into a cliff was also a calendar, built so that the god of darkness would sit forever in the dark.

An original illustration, available in colour or black and white, created for the Ella's Adventures travel poster series.

No frame included.

Please note that, to protect the original artwork from copyright infringement, the images shown on this website are low resolution. The poster you receive is printed in high resolution, with all the detail and clarity of the original.