Day 7 - Aswan

Today we traveled around Aswan. All the places we went to see were relatively close by. The first stop we made was at an unfinished obelisk. We were told how they made and put up the obelisks all over Egypt. An obelisk is a huge stone, shaped like the Washington monument that is shaped and then transported by boat along the Nile. From the Nile, the obelisk was then transported to the site where it was going to be erected. While it was lying down, the Egyptians would carve all the hieroglyphics and stories into it before they put it up. To get it into the vertical position, they would fill a hole with sand and put the base of the obelisk in the sand. Then as people pulled up on the top of the obelisk using ropes, they would slowly empty the sand until the obelisk was in the upright position. This wasn’t too exciting to see, but to see it half done before it was put in the upright position put it in perspective how large these stones are.

After the unfinished obelisk, we went to the Philae temple. This was one of my favorite stops during the trip so far. The location of the temple was amazing, situated on an island in between the Aswan Dam and the High Dam, and we had to take a motorboat to get to it. The temple was actually originally located on an island about a quarter mile away from the current island it was on. The original island is now completely underwater, so to transfer the temple from island to island, they broke it down into 40,000 pieces, each weighing about 10 tons. Then they shipped it over and reconstructed it on its current island. This was the first temple we’ve seen on the trip and it was amazing. The hieroglyphics and carvings into the walls of the temple were so detailed and they were everywhere. On every column, and every wall, and every ceiling that still remained, there wasn’t a blank spot (that was restored correctly).

In addition to the Philae temple, the High Dam was an engineering masterpiece. As we were driving across the damn, all the engineers were in awe. The other people weren’t too sure what was so special about the dam, asking things like “What is the big deal about the dam?” Structures like this make me like civil engineering that much more. In the picture of the High Dam, it starts where the huge monument with four vertical pieces is. We are at the halfway point of the dam, and the picture is of just the left half of the dam. It has 3 roads, ON THE SIDE OF THE DAM. The side of the dam was too large to go down vertically, so they made it at about a 20 degree angle. That is so ridiculous. Below is another picture of me on the back of the dam, with Nasser Lake in the background. The High Dam can hold water to 181 meters above sea level. That is about 20 times the height of our house. The dam volume is also 42 times that of the Giza pyramid. So if you thought the Giza pyramids were big, imagine the High Dam.