|
Sites:
Egypt
| Portugal |
Iraq |
India |
China |
Turkey
Buried once by the sands of time, untold numbers of archeological
sites, some ranking in importance with Turkey's Zeugma, now face
another more destructive burial, this time by waters and silt from
newly built reservoirs. Other sites have already been lost in this
manner, while a precious few have been saved. Here, learn about six
of the largest dam projects of the past half century—one
completed, another abandoned, and four now underway—that have
posed threats to nearby archeological treasures.
Egypt: Ancient temples rescued at Abu Simbel
During his rule in Egypt from about 1290 to 1224 B.C., Pharaoh
Ramses II commissioned dozens of statues of himself. Among these,
the twin temples at Abu Simbel are his most spectacular self
tributes. Located in Nubia near Egypt's border with Sudan, the Great
Temple at Abu Simbel features four 75-foot-tall statues of Ramses.
Next to it is a smaller temple, which Ramses dedicated to his wife,
Nefertari. Artisans carved the monuments into a sandstone cliff,
which stood at a bend in the Nile as if to mark the entrance to the
Land of the Pharaohs. Builders aligned the temple so that twice a
year—once on Ramses' birthday and once on the anniversary of
his ascension to the throne—the rays of the rising sun pierce
the temple and illuminate four seated statues within.
In the 1960s, construction began on the Aswan High Dam, which would
create the largest artificial lake in the world, Lake Nasser, and
flood the temples at Abu Simbel. To save the monuments from
inundation, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) and a team of German engineers spent four
years in the mid-1960s painstakingly relocating the temples to a
spot 198 feet above their original footprint and 825 feet inland.
After dismantling the temples piece by piece, the relocation teams
reassembled them in the same configuration and orientation. They
also constructed an artificial mountainside around them in order to
retain their cliff-carved appearance. After the completion of the
dam in 1970 and the rise of Lake Nasser, the salvaged temples lay 66
feet from the new lake's shoreline.
|
|
