How did the temple get to the USA?

It’s all to do with water! Egypt doesn’t get much rain and everyone depended on the River Nile for water.

Back then the river flooded every year in late summer, when water flowed into it from the East African drainage basin. The flood water added nutrients and minerals to the soil and helped crops to grow.

But the amount of water wasn’t always the same. Some years the floods were too big and crops were ruined and sometimes there wasn’t enough water and people ran out of food.

In 1900 the Egyptian government built a dam across the River Nile near the town of Aswan.

This created a reservoir and changed the flow of the river.

From then on water came up over the courtyard at the Temple of Dendur when the Nile flooded each year. This wasn’t good for the sandstone walls.

The population of Egypt grew over the next 50 years, especially around the capital city Cairo. More drinking water, food and electricity were needed.

The government planned a new, bigger dam to control the flooding, irrigate more land and provide water and hydroelectricity.

Building it would create a huge lake over lots of land in Nubia.

One million people would need to move to new homes and many temples and monuments would be lost under the water of the dam.

This was the Aswan High Dam and Lake Nasser.

 

Several countries offered to help Egypt build the dam because they thought it would stop droughts and unwanted floods and make life better for the Egyptian people. They offered to help move the people in Nubia to new homes further north in Egypt and further south in Sudan. And they also offered to help save as many temples and monuments as possible by moving them to new locations.

The work on the dam started in 1960 and took 20 years. Teams of archeologists and engineers took many temples apart, moved the stone blocks to higher ground or new locations, and put them back together again.

The Temple of Dendur was moved to the Island of Elephantine near Aswan.

The Nubian people had lived in southern Egypt and Sudan for hundreds of years and their cultural treasures needed to be saved.

UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) built the Nubia Museum in Aswan to display objects and monuments saved from the dam water.

To say thank you for helping, the Egyptian government gave smaller temples to several countries including Spain, Italy, USA, Germany and the Netherlands. The Temple of Dendur was given to the American people in 1965.

US archeologists took it apart and numbered each sandstone block. The US government sent a ship to bring the blocks home.

Then everyone wondered where the temple should be rebuilt.

• Who built the temple and why?
• What did the temple look like?
• How did the temple get to the USA?
• Where is the Temple of Dendur in New York?