COLOSSAL FIGURES IN FRONT OF THE GREAT TEMPLE 
OF ABOO-SIMBEL. 
The first discovery of this extraordinary Temple was made by the celebrated Burckhardt 
on his return from Mahass, after an ineffectual attempt to reach Dongola in the 
spring of 1813. He had visited the Temple of Isis, the lesser Temple of Aboo-Simbel; 
and having, as he supposed, seen all the antiquities here, he was about to ascend the 
sandy side of the mountain by the same path that he had descended, when “having,” 
he says, “luckily turned more to the southward, I fell in with what is still visible 
of four immense colossal statues, cut out of the rock, at a distance of about two 
hundred yards from the lesser Temple: they stand in a deep recess excavated in 
the mountain; but it is greatly to be regretted that they are now almost entirely 
buried beneath the sands, which are blown down here in torrents. The entire head 
and part of the breast and arms of one of the statues are yet above the surface.” 
In 1816 Belzoni ascended the Nile into Nubia, with the intention of opening the 
great Temple of Aboo-Simbel, and commenced his undertaking; but the chiefs of the 
country threw so many obstacles in his way, that at length his funds failed, and he 
was obliged to discontinue, but not until he had cleared downwards twenty feet in the 
front of the Temple. It is remarkable that this is the first time the natives learnt the 
use of money as a recompense for labour. 
In the spring of 1817 he returned to his excavations at Aboo-Simbel, accompanied 
by Mr. Beechey. At Philas they had the good fortune be joined by Captains Irby 
and Mangles, then on their journey in the East. The united exertions of these 
gentlemen accomplished the entrance to the Great Temple in defiance of the dangers 
and difficulties thrown in their way, and which are most interestingly narrated in 
Irby and Mangles’ Travels. Belzoni and his friends removed forty feet of sand, 
which had accumulated above the top of the door before the recent excavations; but 
they carried them no further than three feet below the top of the entrance, when 
they effected their passage into this Temple and saw the most extraordinary work 
that remains to us of the age of Remeses II. Belzoni describes its facade as one 
hundred and seventeen feet wide and eighty-six feet high (Wilkinson says, ninety to 
one hundred feet), the height from the top of the cornice to the top of the door being 
sixty-six feet six inches, and the height of the door twenty feet. Each of these enormous 
statues—the largest in Egypt or Nubia, except the Sphinx of the Pyramid—measures 
from the shoulder to the elbow fifteen feet six inches, the face seven feet, the ears 
three feet six inches, across the shoulders twenty-five feet four inches. Their height 
as they sit is about fifty-one feet not including the caps, which are about fourteen 
feet. These, the most beautiful colossi yet found in any of the Egyptian ruins, represent 
Remeses II.; they are seated on thrones attached to the rock. On the sides, and 
on the front angles of the thrones, and between the legs of the statues, are sculptured 
female figures, supposed to be of his wife and children; they are well preserved, 
though the material is a coarse friable gritstone. During the execution, defects in 
the stone were filled and smoothed with stucco, and afterwards painted, of which traces 
