Day Tour of Aswan

In the morning, Egypt Key tour guide will meet and transfer you from your hotel to visit the island of Philae. It was the center for worship of the goddess Isis and attracted pilgrims from all over the ancient world. The original island is now completely submerged under the waters of Lake Nasser, but in a spectacular rescue operation, the great temples and monuments of Philae were pulled out of the water and re-erected on a nearby island now renamed Philae.

This beautiful temple complex is one of the most picturesque all over Egypt. Philae was one of the last outposts of Egyptian religion that survived for two centuries after the Roman converted to Christianity. The sacred island attracted many Greek and Roman pilgrims who came to pray for healing from the mysterious Egyptian goddess Isis.

The temple of Philae was finally closed in 6^th century AD by the order of Emperor Justinian, some chambers were converted for Christian worship and Coptic community lived on the island until the advent of Islam.

After that, you will visit Aswan High Dam, which is an embankment dam built across the Nile in Aswan between 1960 and 1971. The dam controls flooding, provides increased water storage for irrigation and generating hydroelectricity. The dam was seen as pivotal to Egypt’s planned industrialization. The High Dam has had a significant effect on the economy and culture of Egypt.

Aswan’s High Dam is one of the most important achievements of the last century in Egypt. It contains 18 times the material used in building the great pyramid of Cheops at Giza.

Aswan’s High Dam is 3830 meters long, 980 meters wide at the base and 111 meters tall.

The construction displaced over 100,000 Nubian, whose civilization had called the banks of the Nile in southern Egypt and northern Sudan home for millennia, and the rising waters threatened a number of important ancient monuments. The UNESCO has carried out a spectacular project to rescue all the monuments during the construction of the dam

The Last stop for the day is at the unfinished obelisk of Aswan. Aswan was the source of Egypt’s finest granite, the hard stone Ancient Egyptians used to make statues and to embellished temples, Pyramids and obelisks.

The unfinished obelisk is the largest known obelisk weight 1,200 tones and about 62 Meters high (137 feet), it was ordered by Queen Hatshepsut.

The unfinished obelisk has given archeologists valuable insights into how these monuments were built.

The unfinished obelisk is considered the largest obelisk ever cut in Ancient Egypt.

It is deemed as the greatest of all Egypt’s monoliths, however was never finished

After the Tour you will drop back to your hotel.