ASWAN, Egypt, July 8 (Xinhua) — On a brief boat voyage in the Nile River in Upper Egypt’s tourist city of Aswan, an island called Agilkia appears in the distance, where fortress-like walls surrounding ancient large pylons and columns of a number of temples form the magnificent Philae temple complex.
What’s more astonishing than the breathtaking view is the fact that the Philae temples did not belong to where they are now. They were submerged by floodwater and later salvaged and relocated from Philae Island to the higher Agilkia Island, 500 meters away, in what the UNESCO describes as “the greatest archaeological rescue campaign of all time.”
The UNESCO’s international campaign to save the monuments of Nubia ran from 1960 to 1980 and included Egypt’s temple complexes of Abu Simbel and Philae, both in Aswan, and others in neighboring Sudan.
The temples were submerged because of the construction of Aswan Low Dam in early 1900s and the later construction of Aswan High Dam in the 1960s.
Abdel-Moneim Saeed, director general of Aswan and Nubia antiquities, said the process of dismantling, relocating and reassembling the Philae temple complex took at least eight years, from 1972 to 1980, before it was reopened to visitors in March 1981.
“It took more than five years to store the dismantled pieces and review the inscriptions and drawings on them at el-Shallal area in Aswan, three km from Philae Island, and then they started to move the pieces to the new site, Agilkia Island,” Saeed told Xinhua.
