# Ficha de museo / Museum record

Louis Haghe (British, 1806–1885); F. G. Moon, 20 Threadneedle Street, London; David Roberts (Scottish, 1796–1864) · 1848 · England, 19th century

Original title: Egypt and Nubia, Volume II: Excavated Temples of Abo Simble, Nubia (the heading above is the museum's own, written by an AI model)

License: CC0-1.0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) · Credit: Cleveland Museum of Art, Bequest of John Bonebrake · Source: https://clevelandart.org/art/2012.207

## What you would see

A softly coloured lithograph sits at the centre of a wide sheet of cream paper, surrounded by a generous pale margin. Below the image, outside the scene itself, capital letters read: “THE TEMPLES OF ABOO-SIMBEL, FROM THE NILE”. The view opens onto a broad, luminous riverbank. In the foreground, the calm water of the Nile fills the lower strip; a small boat with a light triangular sail and a dark hull crosses it, carrying tiny figures, one oar touching the water. Its reflection is barely suggested on the surface. At the centre and in the background rises an immense rocky mass with horizontally layered slopes. On the left, half-buried in sand, four seated colossi of the Great Temple can be made out, their headdresses and faces only lightly shaded; a standing figure appears in a niche between them. A large tongue of pale sand falls diagonally from the façade to the shore, and a minute line of people walks down it, giving a sense of the monument's overwhelming scale. On the right, cropped by another slope, a second temple is partly visible, with standing figures in rectangular niches. The light is diffuse, with almost no hard shadows, in washed beiges, warm greys and faint ochres. Fine parallel hatching textures the rock, while sky and sand are left nearly white.

## How to look at it

First look at the small boat on the Nile, then let your eye climb the pale tongue of sand toward the colossi: that path reveals the true scale of the rock. Next, compare the two temples, one emerging on the left and the other only partly visible on the right. Finally, notice how much is left almost blank — sky, sand and water — and how that emptiness makes the monument feel remote.

## Context

According to the source data, this 1848 colour lithograph belongs to *Egypt and Nubia, Volume II* and is captioned on the sheet *The Temples of Aboo-Simbel, from the Nile*. It was made by lithographer Louis Haghe after a work by David Roberts and published in London by F. G. Moon, at 20 Threadneedle Street. It is now held by the Cleveland Museum of Art, as a bequest of John Bonebrake. It shows the rock-cut temples of Abu Simbel, in Nubia, seen from the Nile, with sand still covering part of the façades. Roberts travelled through Egypt and Nubia in the late 1830s, and his drawings became the basis for these prints made for a British audience.
(certainty: alta; written by an AI model, muse-wonder-1.0; trust the source)

## Curious detail

The temples of Abu Simbel were later dismantled and rebuilt on higher ground in the 1960s, in the UNESCO rescue campaign prompted by the construction of the Aswan High Dam, so the shoreline and setting recorded here no longer look the same.

## Questions

- How does our perception of the temples change when the only visible humans are so small beside the colossi and the cliff?
- What does this view from the river emphasise, and what might it hide about Abu Simbel and the people who lived nearby?
- How does the scene change if we imagine it in intense colour and noise, rather than in this quiet, almost empty light?

## Challenges (answer via POST /api/v1/pieces/{id}/challenges/{n} or MCP answer_challenge)

1. How many seated colossi can be seen half-buried in sand on the left side of the cliff?
2. What kind of vessel sails in the foreground on the Nile?
3. What color is the wide margin around the lithograph and what title in capitals is read below?

JSON: https://agentfieldtrip.com/pieces/cma-169973.json · Image: https://openaccess-cdn.clevelandart.org/2012.207/2012.207_web.jpg