Abu Simbel

The heart of Turrell’s work is the Roden Crater, out in Arizona. François Jonquet met the artist at his ranch, in the Painted Desert, and visited the Crater, this work which he is constantly sculpting and developing. He reports on this vertiginous experience

The equinoctial sun comes back to the same point in the sky as is noticed in the case of Sri Padmanabha Swamy temple in India and in many ancient monuments around the world. Built at different time periods, these monuments are seen to be aligned with the tropical equinox and solstices of today. The only possible explanation for the same phenomena seen now of the structures built at different times of the past can be the absence of axial precession of the earth. This paper analyses this with evidences from the ancient monuments.

Five documents mentioning dhnt in a Kushite context are scrutinized, starting from a quotation of the Brooklyn magical papyrus. Two of these five documents, one of them for sure, the other most probably, refer to the Djebel Barkal. The question of the pinnacle, image of the agathodaemon protecting the mountain, is examined as well as the presence of Amun inside the mountain as described by the texts. The famous scene of B 300 representing Amun behind the diagonal line of the dhn.t with the raised cobra in front of him is compared with the one in the first hypostyle hall
of Abu Simbel, understood here as a parallel representing the Amun of Abu Simbel protected by his own agathodaemon. The links of the Kushite Amun, embodied in the ram, with water (flood, rain, wells) is well attested and Egyptian examples are widely spread. This power on water as the mean of life par excellence explains the ram horn around the ear of Amun master of the flood in the Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak as well as the same horn around the ears of the Kushite kings. If Kush is described as a land of dhnw.t, it is because the Egyptians have acknowledged the great number of
them in the geomorphology of Sudan as well as the role given to them by the Kushites to enter in contact with the divine, would it be inside natural caves or monumental speoï.

Abu Simbel, built in honor of Rameses II, includes four colossi Rameses’ statues with his dwarfed Queen mother Tu–e and wife (consort/mother goddess) Nefertari (deified Hathor) at his feet. The inclusion of the queen Tu–e and Nefertari suggests matrilinear descent of the royal mothers. This Nubian monument was constructed over the former ancient Hathor’s Abshek’s Sacred Cave. (Given the construction of Lake Nasser in 1968, Abu Simbel was moved to higher ground to its current site.)

This article published in a leading web magazine of India, throws light on the ancient structures seen aligned with the equinox of today and discusses how this is in conflict with the current theory of precession of the equinoxes that is based on the proposition that the equinox keeps shifting on the ecliptic due to the shift in the axial tilt of the earth. Links to two more articles are given at the end, giving further details on the Vedic (Siddhantic) version of to-and-fro oscillation of the equinoxes.

Slovenes travelled to Egypt for a variety of reasons and their numbers increased greatly during the first half of the 19th century when a line voyage was established between Trieste and Alexandria. Even though most travellers remained in northern Egypt, certain individuals travelled further south. One such noteworthy example was the missionary Ignacij Knoblehar and his co-workers, who worked in the area of present day Sudan. In the mid 19th century a lot of Slovenes travelled across the territories of former Nubia and interesting records and visual materials have been preserved from this period. In the 20th century Nubia was visited by few Slovenian travellers, however the restorer Miha Pirnat from Ljubljana deserves special attention. In 1963 and 1964 he was a member of the Yugoslav team within the frame of the international mission that was working on the preservation of monuments in the area which was to be flooded once the large Aswan dam was completed. Pirnat photographically documented his fieldwork and thus created an important photographic archive of archaeological sites such as Wadi es-Sebua, Abu Hodah, Abdallah Nirqi and Abd el-Ghadir.

From the 1930s to the late 1970s, American archaeologists pursued a paired agenda of science and salvage such that their focus on logical positivism converged with US foreign policy towards international technical assistance. River basin salvage archaeology, pioneered in the US by the Tennessee Valley Authority and exported to the Middle East in the 1950s, was a prime example of American Cold War techno-politics that accompanied other international aid and technical assistance programmes. Amphitheaters of archaeology along the Nile and Euphrates were fertile testing grounds for the development of what became known as the ‘New Archaeology’, but also new deals, new science, infrastructure, and agriculture within a Cold War setting, so that monumental heritage and dam projects became flashpoints between American visions for the Middle East and attempts by UNESCO to maintain the spirit of internationalism.

Paradoxal, poate, dar nicăieri în altă parte nu este mai pregnantă celebrarea bucuriei de a trăi decât în mormintele egiptene. În multe dintre acestea, într-o cromatică încă efervescentă, conservată în bună măsură, reliefurile și statuaria din calcar pictat, ori doar picturile murale, redau, într-o manieră eternizantă, momente din viața cotidiană. Pentru omul egiptean mormântul era un adevărat accelerator al nemuririi, care, de-a lungul celor peste trei milenii de civilizație, devenise, în cele din urmă, accesibilă oricui. Mai exact, oricui știa să respecte setul de ritualuri esențiale. La nivel arheologic, săpăturile au dat la iveală o mulțime de necropole, atât ale particularilor – membri ai elitei, ai artizanilor, ai diferitelor categorii de lucrători etc. –, cât și ale regalității, cantitatea de artefacte creând perspectiva unui uriaș cimitir care „mustește” de viață eternă.

The appearance of the term “Anthropocene” attests to the birth of a new era in which the human being stands out as the main geological force of the planet. A large number of indicators shows from 1950 a sudden increase of both urban and world population, pollution, area of domesticated land, etc. This visible superstructural evolution has its downside. Behind the scene, it is accompanied by the production of numerous invisible infrastructures dedicated to transport, human and urban metabolism, telecommunications, etc. The prevailing dream of a global dematerialization obscures the real part of our artefacts to such an extent that it is surprising to hear Stiegler, a French philosopher, describing our era as hypermaterial.
Is this hidden hypermateriality generating a new kind of environment, an anthropo-scene? Does it alter the relation between humans and their built environment and inaugurate a new phenomenal era?
To answer those questions, the article briefly introduces the role assigned to architecture considering the original division of the speaking being (Lacan). To him, architecture has the task to mediate the difference, the one between his ideal I and his real condition. The article proceeds, afterwards, to analyze the New Great Temple of Abu Simbel considered as being symptomatic of our time because it concentrates its distinctive symbolic and technical forces. This architectural piece of art built for the gods in the 13th century BC has been relocated for the humans in 1964 to be kept from the waters of Lake Nasser. The analysis highlights that the temple has not only been relocated but substantially modified (rock cut into pieces, new concrete structure, artificial site, etc.). Even if most of the differences between the original temple and the new are hidden, some indications make the experience of the visitors very strange. To better understand this experience, the article spells out the Freudian approach of the Unheimlich (Uncanny) later pursued by Mori (Uncanny Valley). It proposes that two different objects, a robot and a human for example, can cause anxiety from a certain degree of resemblance. This is because it questions the ontico-ontological difference of the speaking being. By analogy between the specificities of the New Great Temple of Abu Simbel and those of the anthropo-scene, the article postulates finally the generalization of this particular feeling to the whole of our built environment because it tries to imitate what it was but no longer is. This underlines the necessity for architects to propose another form of environment considering the new infrastructural context of the Anthropocene.