Qualla: Abu Simbel Phoenician graffiti

Abu Simbel Phoenician graffiti: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Warren LeMay from Cullowhee, NC, United States, CC0. Look at the legs of the giant statues at Abu Simbel and you can read the oldest tourist graffiti in the world. The four colossi of Ramses II stand twenty meters high, gazing east across what was once the Nile and is now Lake Nasser. Somewhere around 593 BCE, a group of Phoenician soldiers and Greek mercenaries passed by on campaign, stood at the feet of a god-king who had been dead for six centuries, and did what travelers have always done: they carved their names. Those carvings survive, tiny letters scratched into sandstone legs, known today as the Abu Simbel Phoenician graffiti.

Image: Warren LeMay from Cullowhee, NC, United States | CC0

Abu Simbel Phoenician graffiti: Noticed in 1845

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit R Muscat, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Frenchman Jean-Jacques Ampere, son of the physicist for whom the electrical unit is named, first spotted two of the inscriptions in 1845 during a voyage up the Nile. He copied what he saw and sent the copies to Louis Felicien de Saulcy, an early Orientalist scholar, who publi...

Image: R Muscat | CC BY-SA 2.0

Abu Simbel Phoenician graffiti: The Campaign of Psamtik II

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Warren LeMay from Cullowhee, NC, United States, CC0. The graffiti connect to one of the most consequential military operations of the Late Period. Around 593 BCE, the Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik II launched a campaign south into Kush, the Nubian kingdom that had once conquered Egypt and still controlled the upper Nile. Psamtik's army ...

Image: Warren LeMay from Cullowhee, NC, United States | CC0

Abu Simbel Phoenician graffiti: Faces Across the Threshold

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Warren LeMay from Cullowhee, NC, United States, CC0. The specific geometry matters. Two pairs of colossi flank the entrance to the Great Temple. The four-line Phoenician graffiti known as CIS I 112 a through d sit on the outside of the right shin of Colossus 2. The five-line Ionic Greek inscription sits on the outside of the left s...

Image: Warren LeMay from Cullowhee, NC, United States | CC0

Abu Simbel Phoenician graffiti: What Graffiti Remembers

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Warren LeMay from Cullowhee, NC, United States, CC0. There is something touching about these inscriptions that runs against the grain of archaeology. Psamtik II's campaign failed to permanently break Kushite power, and his dynasty did not last much longer. The Phoenician cities themselves would fall to Alexander a few centuries lat...

Image: Warren LeMay from Cullowhee, NC, United States | CC0

Abu Simbel Phoenician graffiti: Seen from Above

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 2.0. From the air the temple complex looks deceptively simple, a facade cut into a sandstone cliff above the blue sheet of Lake Nasser. The actual structure has been moved. In the 1960s, UNESCO sawed Abu Simbel into numbered blocks and reassembled it on higher ground to save it from t...

Image: CC BY-SA 2.0