It is 4am, we dock in Aswan, jolted awake by the roaring engine of our motorboat.
Aswan the indolent, the ‘best city in Egypt’.. Omar Sharif called it, who knows what he meant. Shortly afterwards, at around 5.30am, we are already in the breakfast room. This trip teaches one to challenge one’s biorhythms: omelets, pancakes, waffles, yoghurt, plain rice and foul (the ancient divine food of the pharaohs), salads… everything is at our mercy long before dawn light. Descending towards Sudan, the atmosphere becomes more humid and opaquer, the temperatures rise, the sky clouds over, making the Nile murkier.
The traveller who persists in continuing to Nubia can only abandon himself to the Nile late in the evening, when the south wind blows, then forced to wake up at dawn in order to visit the mainland. He rests in the afternoon, after a nourishing lunch, trying to refresh his limbs that have been weakened by the morning’s rises. I hear on the deck that tomorrow we will wake up at 3.30 a.m. for Abu Simbel…
Ancient Aswan
Roaring is also the motor of the barge that takes us to the temple of Philae, around 6.30 am, in the silence of the Nile, at sunrise. The Greek term Philae referred to two islands located in the Aswan Cataract, borders and military garrison of the Egyptian kingdom, as well as a commercial hub. The Egyptians had this strategic location protected by the goddess Isis, dedicating this temple to her, one of the most important places of pilgrimage for the Nubians as well, as carved in the ‘obelisk of Philae’ (where Cleopatra’s name can also be glimpsed), which Giovan Battista Belzoni moved from here to the Kingston Lacy estate in England. It was through the inscriptions on this obelisk and the Rosetta Stone that the hieroglyphs were deciphered. Before him, an expedition of Napoleonic Egyptologists came here in 1799, then it was the turn of the Italians, who by the end of the 1880s unearthed the half-submerged temple of Isis, moving it 550 m away to the island of Agilkia. Under the direction of architect Giovanni Ioppolo, the temple was surrounded by protective dykes, subsequently dismantled and rebuilt in its current location. The endangered monumental complex, formerly known as the Pearl of the Nile, recalled by Pierre Loti’s work Mort de Phile, led the Unesco countries to launch an international competition to save the monuments of Phile.
However, compared to the temples of Lower Egypt, the temple does not possess the same size and magnificence, it fails to captivate with the same power. Yet Isis, the goddess of life, fertility and magic, was not only worshipped here by the natives, but also by the Greek and Roman occupying powers, in whose empires the mystery rites of Isis spread, especially among women (it seems that some cult centres have even been found in faraway Hungary). Sometimes likened to the cult of the goddess of the Roman pantheon Ceres, the mystery rites of Isis seemed to promise to save the faithful from Hades with the promise of the Elysian Fields. The syncretic context that originated around the goddess also interested Christianity, which like all mystery cults was a religion of salvation, with the difference that it recognised in the Virgin Mary the figure of the Mother Goddess.
Aswan today
From place of pilgrimage to destination of exploration by great travellers of the 19th century…what of today’s Aswan? Few would know it were it not for the spectacular dam built in the 1960s, the geopolitical trophy of Gemal Abdel Nasser. It was a time when the United States and the Soviet Union, protagonists of the new world order, were playing at extending their sphere of influence over newly decolonised states in need of infrastructure works. The Americans operated through the longa manus of the Bretton Woods institutions, the Soviets through the financing of huge and spectacular public works. In 1956, only four years after the revolution, General Nasser made it known, in a blatant gesture, that he did not like to keep waiting for a loan from either of the two blocs: thus, by nationalising the Suez Canal, he would finance the construction of the Aswan Dam. This quickly triggered the Suez Crisis, the ill-fated military venture of Great Britain and France, who still believed they could save the money they had invested since the construction of the Canal (1867). Anachronistically convinced that they could still exercise a certain political-military role, the new era showed they were just hostage to nostalgia. At Sevres, in secret, the two old European powers planned military intervention involving Israel, which would create the casus belli for the intervention of the Anglo-French axis in Suez. Only Israel did end up benefiting from obtaining the first Red Sea harbour at Eilat. The United Nations created the first Blue Helmets military mission, 46,000 men who would garrison the disputed territory for years to come. In other words, the United States and the Soviet Union signalled to the Old European powers to step aside, decreed a cease-fire and reserved for them a second-rate geostrategic decision-making autonomy, depriving them of any residual post-colonial ambitions. At last, Egypt had the revenue to build its phantom dam, given the insufficient results of those built by the Germans and British in the early 20th century. A grandiose work of internal propaganda, a triumph of balancing between the superpowers, Egypt consecrated itself champion of the non-aligned countries, acquiring the fame necessary to exercise leadership in the pan-Arab movement. The dam was completed in 1970, an immense work that cushioned the effects of the Nile’s periodic famines and floods, still managing to supply more than half of Egypt’s electricity needs. For the first time in the 1970s, almost all Egyptians enjoyed electricity, and even the Soviets took some of the credit for it, eventually financing 1/3 of the project.. Not surprisingly, today an imposing monument celebrating Egyptian-Soviet friendship greets us at the dam’s entrance. But everything has a price: the dam generated 6000 square metres of artificial Lake Nasser, worrying archaeologists, who rushed to save temples in Nubia, such as Abu Simbel, which would inevitably be submerged. In addition, not only were the Nubian populations that had lived locally for millennia uprooted and deported to the desert and to the south, bordering Sudan, but also the environmental impact of the work diminished the strength of the Nile, leading to the advance of salt water from the delta and the consequent disappearance of some agricultural crops, the alteration of the marine fauna and the consequent decrease in the productivity of the river’s fisheries. However, energy was given, and this, according to Nasser, could justify almost anything and especially the ‘sacrifice’ of the Nubian population.
Who are the Nubians, by the way? They are nowadays a linguistic minority of about 100,000 Nubian-Saharan and Arabic-speaking people, descendants of a civilisation dating back to Ancient Egypt. Since their deportation, Nubians have been politically and socio-economically marginalised, subject to the Arabisation and the assimilation (neutralisation?) of all other linguistic minorities in Ehypt. They are normally confined to professions considered second-class, they are doormen, domestic servants and drivers. Any attempt by them to mobilise collectively has always been suppressed by the government, which considers them a threat to national unity, forcing them to deny any separatist ambitions. With the Tahrir Square revolution (2011), the Nubians finally took part in the first anti-government demonstration and were able to claim the return of their expropriated lands on Lake Nasser through a representation at the negotiates in the 2014 constitutional process. Article 236 of the Constitution in fact mentions ‘Nubia’ as a territory to be returned in a 10-year period (2024), although implementation remains distant due to a later presidential decree classifying sixteen Nubian villages as part of a military zone.
Following a few ‘obstinate’ protests, the activists were promptly arrested, and the Nubian question seems to be heading towards what without human intervention (or the protection of the goddess Isis?) would have been the fate of the temple of File, submerged into oblivion in the deep Nubian waters…
