Lake Nasser, Egypt. Photo by Carole Raddato on Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).

This article by Ahmad Matarik was first published in Arabic on Raseef22 on July 7, 2025. This edited translation is published on Global Voices as part of a media partnership agreement. 

When Egypt began serious plans to build the massive Aswan High Dam in 1954, the world’s attention quickly turned to the treasures of Nubia, the ancient land straddling the modern borders of Egypt and Sudan. This vast region, stretching roughly from Aswan to Sudan’s fourth cataract, was home to temples, tombs, and rock inscriptions — remnants of millennia of interconnected civilizations. But the dam’s enormous reservoir threatened to swallow these irreplaceable traces of humanity under its rising waters.

It wasn’t Egypt’s first encounter with such a dilemma. As early as 1902, when the first Aswan Dam was built, engineers scrambled to shore up endangered temples like Philae, while some Nubian families were pushed to higher ground, though without yet losing their ancestral lands entirely. But the High Dam was of a different scale altogether. The new lake, known as Lake Nasser in Egypt and Lake Nubia in Sudan, would engulf hundreds of miles of fertile valleys, archaeological sites, and entire communities.

The island of Philae, submerged due to the completion of the Aswan Low Dam. Photo on Wikimedia Commons. Public domain

A global plea to save the past

Thanks to tireless lobbying by Egypt’s culture minister Tharwat Okasha, UNESCO was persuaded to lead an unprecedented international rescue effort. In March 1960, the organization formed a committee of global experts chaired by Sweden’s King Gustaf VI, launching what it called “the greatest archaeological rescue operation of all time.”

Yet lost in many of these triumphalist narratives is another urgent cry for help, one that came from Sudan.

Sudan’s quieter plea

Just six months after Egypt’s 1959 international appeal, Sudan issued its own call to save its share of Nubia. Less known, this appeal sought to rescue temples, tombs, and rock art in what was arguably the richest archaeological region of Sudan — a land that had for millennia acted as both neighbor and partner to Egypt’s ancient kingdoms.

But Sudan faced a steeper uphill battle. Only independent since 1956, it had far fewer resources and less international clout. Many of its sites were barely studied or entirely unknown. As UNESCO itself later admitted, “the Sudanese Nubia, unlike Egyptian Nubia, was practically unexplored.”

Sudan moved quickly. Before any monuments could be dismantled, the government ordered aerial photography of the entire threatened area — 113 miles of Nile valley — followed by detailed archaeological surveys. It was a race against time as the waters of the dam began creeping southward in 1964.

Temples on the move

Ultimately, four temples and one princely tomb were selected for relocation to the grounds of Sudan’s new National Museum in Khartoum. Under German architect Friedrich Hinkel’s guidance, crews chemically treated crumbling stones, dismantled them block by block, floated them on barges to Wadi Halfa, then loaded them onto trains bound for the capital.

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 being flooded. Wikimedia Commons: Public Domain

These included the temple of Aksha, built by Ramses II, which arrived in Khartoum in 1968, and Buhen, a massive fortress-temple erected under Queen Hatshepsut and Thutmose III. Buhen’s relocation stretched from 1963 to 1969, a painstaking task to save a structure that had once guarded Egypt’s southern frontier.

Nearby, an ancient rock carving on Jebel Sheikh Suleiman recorded Egypt’s first dynasty conquest of Nubia. Workers delicately cut the entire rock face free and installed it in the museum garden. Two temples from Semna and the tomb of Prince Djehutyhotep, adorned with vivid carvings, followed. By 1970, these monuments stood reconstructed around an artificial water channel meant to evoke the Nile — a bittersweet replica of their lost homeland.

A sacrifice for Egypt’s dream

Despite these successes, most of Sudan’s submerged Nubia vanished. As French archaeologist Christiane Desroches Noblecourt famously put it, “the great majority of temples were saved, and yet a considerable part of Nubia disappeared.”

This wasn’t just about stones. Entire Nubian communities were uprooted. In Sudan, some 54,000 people were moved to a hastily built settlement called New Halfa in the east. Stripped of their traditional riverine environment, many lost their language and cultural rhythms. Sudanese writer Osman Ahmed Nour recounted how the region’s hot sulfur springs, once a healing pilgrimage site near Dongola, lay forever submerged. “Before the High Dam,” he wrote, “people came from far and wide for these therapeutic baths. Afterwards, all was under water.”

Egypt’s Nubians suffered a similar fate, relocated to Kom Ombo, where separation from their ancestral lands eventually eroded their language. Ironically, decades later, the Egyptian army would use Nubian as a secret code language during the 1973 war, by then unintelligible to most Egyptians.

A hidden Nubia revealed

If there was one slender silver lining for Sudan, it was that the dam triggered a flurry of archaeological exploration. In the frantic window before inundation, the number of foreign missions jumped from six in 1960 to 22 from 17 different countries. These teams unearthed Christian-era cities, medieval churches, and rich burial grounds that radically expanded the known history of Sudanese Nubia.

A Polish mission discovered a unique church and precious artifacts. A Ghanaian team uncovered the remains of a large Christian city near Debeira. A Yugoslav crew rescued wall paintings from a church in Abd el-Qadir. East Germany’s exhaustive surveys documented 40 sites across nearly 140 kilometers (87 miles), including 13 previously unknown. They even found multilingual documents in Arabic, Nubian, and older scripts that shed new light on Sudan’s literary past.

In 1971, Khartoum’s new National Museum officially opened, its gardens now home to temples that once stood hundreds of miles upriver. Around them lay treasures from Meroë and Wadi Halfa — a powerful testament to Sudan’s layered civilizations. For many Sudanese, UNESCO later noted, this rescue “awakened a sense of national pride in a past they could claim as their own.”

Echoes of loss

Yet heritage alone could not mend the heartbreak of displacement. Nubians on both sides of the border composed mournful songs about their drowned homelands. In Egypt, musician Hamza El Din made the plight of Nubia a haunting centerpiece of his work. In Sudan, villagers staged plays and songs that preserved the sorrow of forced migration.

Today, as Sudan faces fresh upheavals, even these saved treasures are under threat. Last year, officials revealed that Khartoum’s museum had been looted, with artifacts turning up for sale in South Sudan.

It’s a stark reminder: while the temples of Nubia were carried to safety, the human stories — of exile, of lost languages and drowned memories — still await a reckoning. For Nubians in Sudan and Egypt, the Aswan High Dam is a monument to profound, often overlooked sacrifice.