Abu Simbel, Egypt · Travel Poster

Each poster comes with a letter home. Ella writes about the place and its hidden history, and the details that never makes it into the guidebooks.

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.

This poster is an original illustration in watercolour and ink, painted exclusively for the Ella's Adventures travel poster series.

No frame included.