International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia
The International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia was the relocation of 22 monuments in Lower Nubia, in Southern Egypt and northern Sudan, between 1960 and 1980. This was done in order to make way for the building of the Aswan Dam, at the Nile's first cataract which was a necessary infrastructure project following the 1952 Egyptian Revolution. This project was undertaken under UNESCO leadership and a coalition of 50 countries. This process led to the creation of the World Heritage Convention in 1972, and thus the system of UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
UNESCO brochure on the anniversary of the campaign
The statue of Ramses the Great at the Great Temple of Abu Simbel is reassembled after having been moved in 1967 to save it from flooding.
Image: Ramsis, Aswan Governorate, Egypt panoramio
Image: Tempel Amada 008
Lower Nubia is the northernmost part of Nubia, roughly contiguous with the modern Lake Nasser, which submerged the historical region in the 1960s with the construction of the Aswan High Dam. Many ancient Lower Nubian monuments, and all its modern population, were relocated as part of the International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia; Qasr Ibrim is the only major archaeological site which was neither relocated nor submerged. The intensive archaeological work conducted prior to the flooding means that the history of the area is much better known than that of Upper Nubia. According to David Wengrow, the A-Group Nubian polity of the late 4th millenninum BCE is poorly understood since most of the archaeological remains are submerged underneath Lake Nasser.
Lower Nubia lies mainly between the first and second cataracts with some historical overlappings.