Every Then & Theory plate comes from a true story, and this card tells the one behind yours.

The Then & Theory team

The temple that moved

Seated giants and a sun with hands fill this plate. At Abu Simbel in southern Egypt, four seated statues of Ramesses II, each about 20 metres tall, guard the Great Temple he built in the 1200s BC. On two days a year, around 22 February and 22 October, the morning sun reaches the whole length of the temple and lights the shrine at its far end. In the 1960s the lake behind the new Aswan High Dam would have drowned it, so an international team cut the temples apart and rebuilt them more than 60 metres higher. The sun with hands is the Aten, as Akhenaten’s artists drew it.

Note. The plate joins two things that never met. Akhenaten’s Aten belongs to the 1300s BC; Ramesses II came to the throne about 60 years after Akhenaten died.

Sources

1. Britannica, “Abu Simbel”
2. UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Nubian Monuments from Abu Simbel to Philae”
3. Britannica, “Akhenaten”