Abu Simbel

Abu Simbel's story begins with a cliff on the west bank of the Nile, about 240 kilometres south-west of Aswan, where Ramesses II had two temples cut into the sandstone in the 13th century BC — one for himself and the gods Amun, Ra-Horakhty and Ptah, the other for his queen Nefertari and the goddess Hathor. This was Nubia, the land Egypt ruled and quarried for gold, and the colossi facing the river were as much a statement to travellers from the south as an act of worship. The temples were abandoned with the old religion, and drifting sand buried the facade until the Swiss traveller Johann Ludwig Burckhardt recorded them in 1813; Giovanni Belzoni dug his way into the Great Temple four years later.

The modern village exists because of the second great engineering project of the place. When the Aswan High Dam was built in the 1960s, the rising waters of Lake Nasser would have covered the temples entirely. Between 1964 and 1968 an international campaign co-ordinated by UNESCO cut both temples into more than a thousand blocks, lifted them about 65 metres and rebuilt them against artificial hills of concrete, reproducing the original orientation. The camp that housed engineers and workers became a permanent settlement.

The same waters drowned the Nubian villages of the valley, and most of their people were resettled in the areas of Aswan and Kom Ombo. The village that grew from the workers' camp is a Nubian settlement on a lakeshore standing where the old fields were, and with almost no farmland left it now lives from the temples. In 1979 the temples were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list as part of the Nubian Monuments, from Abu Simbel to Philae.

This is a Nubian village, and the difference from Egypt further north is heard immediately: Nubian languages are spoken alongside Arabic at home and in the street, and families trace themselves to villages that no longer exist above water. Songs about the lost land, the tar drum and the oud are a part of weddings and of long evenings outdoors, and houses are often painted in bright colours with decorated doorways, the domestic style Nubians carried with them when they moved.

Life is Muslim and conservative in the ordinary sense — the mosque sets the hours, Ramadan reorders the day, Eid empties the shops and fills the houses. Hospitality is taken seriously in a place where visitors have always come from a long way off, and refusing tea takes more effort than accepting it. Men in galabiyas sit out in the cool of the evening; women's social life runs through the family compounds.

The temples give the village its second identity. Nearly every household has some connection to the site, as a guard, guide, driver, cook or stallholder, and the two sun alignments in February and October are the village's own festival as much as an archaeological curiosity, with drumming, dancing and stalls on the terrace in the dark before sunrise. People here are used to crowds arriving at dawn and gone by noon, and to the silence that follows.

A few thousand people live in Abu Simbel, which makes it a village rather than a town, and almost everyone depends directly or indirectly on the temples, the airport and the lake. Work follows the visitors: an early start to meet the first coaches and flights, a long pause through the middle of the day when the heat makes outdoor work impossible, and activity again in the late afternoon and evening. Fishing on Lake Nasser, some small-scale farming on irrigated plots, government jobs and the school make up most of the rest.

The village is laid out in blocks of single-storey housing with a market street, a mosque, a clinic and a football pitch. Supplies come by road from Aswan, which makes some things expensive and others simply unavailable, and power and water are reminders of how far out this is. Mobile coverage is good; the desert beyond the last houses is not.

The quiet years of the trade are felt sharply here, because there is no other industry to fall back on. Regional crises that keep visitors away from Egypt empty the hotels within weeks. Against that, the village has grown steadily since the 1960s, and a generation that has never known the old Nubian valley now runs the guesthouses, the boats and the stalls.

Eating in Abu Simbel is a mix of standard Egyptian food and Nubian home cooking. The everyday plates are ful medames, slow-cooked fava beans eaten with bread for breakfast, ta'meya, the Egyptian falafel made from fava beans, grilled chicken and kofta, rice, and salads of tomato and cucumber. Bread is the round flat aish baladi, and in Upper Egypt the sun-risen aish shamsi appears as well.

Nubian cooking is the local speciality and is found mostly in guesthouses rather than restaurants: okra stews, meat cooked slowly with tomato, flatbread baked on a griddle, and dishes built around lentils and beans. Fish from Lake Nasser — Nile perch and tilapia — is grilled or fried and is as fresh as anything in the country, since it is caught within sight of the village.

Drinks are what the heat demands. Tea is strong, dark and heavily sweetened, karkadeh, the deep-red hibiscus infusion, is served hot in winter and iced in summer, and sugarcane juice is pressed to order. Dates are the standard sweet, and the syrupy Egyptian pastries — basbousa and konafa — appear at feasts. Alcohol is served in a few hotels but is not part of village life.