Two of the four seated colossi, each 20 m (66 ft) high, of the long-ruling 19th Dynasty New Kingdom Pharaoh, Ramesses II, that dominate the façade of the Great Temple he built in the 13th Century BC at Abu Simbel, Aswan Governate, Egypt. Smaller effigies of his wives and children stand alongside the colossi and between their feet. The two massive rock temples at Abu Simbel stand on the western bank of Lake Nasser in Nubia, Upper Egypt. They were relocated in 1968 to an artificial hill high above the Aswan High Dam reservoir, to stop them being engulfed by the lake’s rising waters.
Abu Simbel, Aswan Governate, Egypt: two of the four seated colossi, each about 20 m (66 ft) high, of the long-ruling 19th Dynasty New Kingdom Pharaoh, Ramesses II, that dominate the façade of the Great Temple he built in the 13th Century BC. Much smaller effigies of his wives and children stand alongside the colossi and between their feet. The two massive rock temples at Abu Simbel stand near the border with Sudan on the western bank of Lake Nasser in Nubia, Upper Egypt. The entire complex was relocated in 1968 to an artificial hill made from a domed structure, high above the Aswan High Dam reservoir, to prevent the temples being engulfed by the rising waters of the lake. The temples complex is part of the Nubian Monuments UNESCO World Heritage Site, which extends north from Abu Simbel down the Nile to Philae, near Aswan. This is a digital file from a high resolution (4,000 DPI) scan of an image shot on film in 1993 using a Mamiya 1000S 645 medium format camera. The film used was Fujichrome Provia 100 6cm x (645) colour transparency stock. The scanner used was a Nikon Super Coolscan 9000 ED professional film scanner.
Size: 6199px × 8457px
Location: Great Temple of Ramesses II, Abu Simbel, Aswan Governate, Egypt
Photo credit: © Terence Kerr / Alamy / Afripics
License: Royalty Free
Model Released: No
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