Word: abu
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...waters-some of them simply by being cut up and carted away. A West German engineering firm won a UNESCO contract to save the Upper River's most famous temple: the sandstone statuary and columns carved 3,000 years ago on the order of Pharaoh Ramses II at Abu Simbel, 180 miles above Aswan...
...German engineers last week unloaded their heavy earth-moving equipment, unfurled their geological maps, and began plotting the most daring construction job undertaken in Egypt since the Pharaohs built the Pyramids. Carved in the sandstone cliff above the Germans' camp are the 3,300-year-old monuments of Abu Simbel - two cavernous temples and ten mammoth statues built by Ramses II. The job: to cut these relics out of the cliff side and lift them, piece by piece, to be assembled on a higher location, where the waters will not reach them when the High Dam is completed...
...charge of foreign business and is expected to take over the firm next year: "We must continue to break our geographical boundaries." Hartmann looks to Asia, Africa and South America as places where future projects will be big enough to interest Hochtief. Besides the temple job at Abu Simbel, Hochtief has eight other major foreign projects on hand, ranging from a harbor in India to power plants in Buenos Aires. In the postwar period, the firm has completed $200 million worth of foreign construction, including India's first big steel plant, an imperial palace near Teheran and Athens...
...more. German firms, he feels, have a special advantage in sensitive new nations, because Germany has not been a colonial power since World War I. German firms also benefit from the self-interested way in which Bonn hands out foreign aid. Hochtief got a leg up for the big Abu Simbel project by winning a smaller, but highly important contract to move an ancient temple at Kalabsha that was also threatened with flooding from the Aswan dam. Hochtief won that contract last year after Bonn lent the Egyptians $1,500,000-on the condition that a German firm would...
Some people doubt that Abu Simbel is worth even $36 million. They argue that the temple has little artistic value and that money could be better spent preserving monuments less extensively catalogued. But the skeptics form a small minority. Drew Middleton, one of many recent last-chance visitors, observed in The New Yorker that "if either the pyramids or Abu Simbel had to be flooded ... one would flood the Pyramids...