Temples in Abu Simbel saved from flooding

In March this year, UNESCO celebrated the 50th anniversary of the campaign to save the world famous Nubian Monuments. Ragnar Fossgaard, a retired engineer from Sweco, was there in the 1960s and was invited by the Egyptian Government to attend the anniversary together with Kaj Möller, Overseas Manager at Sweco.

The temple before the move

Construction of the Aswan High Dam was started in the 1960s. The dam affected the water level in the Nile and threatened to flood the ancient temples of Abu Simbel, located on the shore of the Lake Nasser reservoir.

Sweco (at that time VBB) was commissioned to act as consulting engineer and architect for the entire project. Engineering and detail planning for control and monitoring were carried out at the head office in Stockholm, although VBB had a team working on site for a period of three years (1964-1967). One member of the team, Ragnar Fossgaard, moved to Egypt in order to take part in the project.
“It was a race against the clock. We had only 14 months from the time the decision was made to relocate the temple before it would have been flooded,” says Ragnar Fossgaard.

After the relocation

An international consortium of some ten contractors formed a joint venture (Joint Venture Abu Simbel) to carry out the work. During the most intensive periods, there were up to 1,600 engineers, administrative staff and construction workers on the site.  

Between 1964 and 1965, the two 3,000-year-old temples were dismantled by being cut into large blocks and moved 65 meters higher and 200 meters back from Lake Nasser and its rising waters. A total of 10,000 blocks were removed and reassembled in the new location where each piece, weighing up to 30 tonnes, was fixed into place with concrete.

When the temples were re-erected, consideration was also given to their previous positions in relation to each other and to the sun. The large temple is designed in such a way that twice a year, the rays of the sun shine all the way into the temple and illuminate the back wall of the innermost room containing the statues of four gods.

The relocation of the temples was carried out with a rigorous precision, with tolerances of only a few millimetres between the old and new sites.
“Aside from the actual relocation of the temple, I would like to mention the structural design of the two concrete domes that were built over the reconstructed temples.

The domes, which can withstand a pressure of 10,000 tonnes, were a necessary to carry the weight of the hills above the temples,” explains Ragnar.

The project had a budget of approximately SEK 200 million in historical monetary value. Egypt provided half of the financing and UNESCO (with contributions from around the world) for the other half.

Today Sweco’s successful export service areas include hydropower and water resource management. For the past ten years we have been continuously involved in projects along the Nile and its adjacent run-off areas.

“Given the development banks’ increasingly concentrated focus on Africa and the global water and energy shortage, we anticipate many new and challenging projects for Sweco,” says Kaj Möller, Overseas Manager at Sweco.