Aswan High Dam/ Kalabsha Temple

Aswan High Dam/ Kalabsha Temple

(Written aboard M/S Eugenie Saturday night; sent Sunday night from Abu Simbel)

On Friday morning, we left Elephantine Island and drove over the causeway that is the top of the High Dam. I have not seen the Hoover Dam but my “fellow travelers” tell me that Aswan is longer but shorter. In any case it is very large, as is the monument to Soviet-Egyptian friendship (in the shape of a stylized lotus flower) commemorating the building of the dam.

After boarding the cruise ship (more on that later) we took a motor launch to Kalabsha Temple. Kalabsha like virtually all the temples below the High Dam is not in its original location. As with Philae,  it was moved during the UNESCO project to save the monuments; Kalabsha was underwritten by the German Government. It is a very large Roman era temple that is architecturally complete but not completely finished with carvings and hieroglyphs. As in Philae and many other temples it is dominated by freestanding “pylons.” I think Kalabsha must be the largest (or among the largest) of the temples in Egypt. Philae is smaller but more beautiful. Kalabsha was relocated on to the mainland just opposite the dam and several other unrelated temples and monuments were also relocated to the same location which is now sort of an outdoor archaeological museum. There is another “Kiosk” from Hadrian’s era, a New Kingdom Temple from the 13^th century BCE and even some “pre-historic” rock drawings of animals from 5,000-6000 BCE. It is marvelous that all these were saved but it is disconcerting to see artifacts from 6,000 BCE next to a temple from 100 CE. Something between a museum’s sculpture garden  and Disneyland.