Temple site in Egypt on the left bank of the Nile between the first and second cataracts. Here the pharaoh Ramses II ( C.1290-1225 B.C. ) caused two great temples to be hewn out of the sandstone cliffs on the river bank. The smaller of the two temples was dedicated to the goddess Hathour, and outside had statues 30 ft high of Ramses and his queen. This larger temple had been started by Seti I, father of ramses II, and was dedicated to the gods Amen-Ra and Ra-Harakht. Facing east were four clossal statues of Ramses seated. The door between the statues led into a courtyard carved 185 ft into the rock, with the rock faces painted like a gigantic film-strip with the events of the pharaoh’s reign. This temple was covered by sand, and was only discovered by the swiss traveller J.L. Burckhardt in 1812, and the sand was not finally cleared until 1910. Today an artificial lake formed by the new Aswan high dam has flooded the original site. In the 1960s, with financial help arranged by UNESCO, the temples were cut into blocks and transported to another site, 210 ft higher and 590 ft farther inlaid. About 590 B.C. some Greek, Carian, and the Phoenician soldiers scratched their names on two of the colossi. These graffiti have proved of great value in understanding the early history of the alphabet as well as in proving the employment of foreigners as mercenaries in the Egyptian armies.