Aswan is the southernmost city in Egypt. Experts believe the name comes from the Nubian phrase assy wangibu, a spectacularly prescient name meaning "too much water." But I believe the name actually comes from the Nubian phrase big-assy wangibu, which means, "too much big-ass stuff."

View of central Aswan from a nearby hill

There is perhaps no place on earth better than Aswan to examine man's enduring love of all things big-ass. For millennia, Aswan has been the site of big-ass construction projects or the quarrying of stone to build big-ass things elsewhere in Egypt. Nowhere does this come in starker relief than in Abu Simbel, spitting distance from the Sudanese border.

Abu Simbel is the jewel in the crown of Egypt's ambitious and enormously successful tourist irritation program. The only road between Aswan and Abu Simbel is closed, so tourists are forced to fly the 300 km to reach the site. Since there is nowhere to stay and nothing else to see, visitors fly back to Aswan some three hours later. This means tourists must negotiate a cab ride to the airport, wait in line to be checked in for the flight, wait to board the plane, fly for half an hour, wait to get off the plane, wait in line for a boarding pass to the return flight, wait for a bus to the site, wait in line for a ticket to the site, wait for a bus back to the airport, wait to board the plane, fly for half an hour back to Aswan, wait to disembark, and negotiate another cab ride back to the city.

The temple at Abu Simbel is the greatest of a long series of structures erected by Ramses II, perhaps history's greatest fetishist of the big-ass. It is fronted by not one, not two, but four big-ass representations of the man himself.

This in itself would be a remarkable example of big-assitude. But wait, there's more. Because some 3200 years after Ramses II, a guy named Gamal Abd el-Nasser decided to build something even bigger-ass: the Aswan High Dam. The High Dam would serve the dual purpose of stopping the annual flood of the Nile from depositing it's naturally fertile silt on the river's banks and of flooding out and forcibly relocating Egypt's entire Nubian population. With the help of the Soviet Union -- also lovers of big-ass projects (more on that later) -- Nasser began this big-ass effort.

But Egyptologists and other big-ass fetishists protested. The Dam would flood the temple at Abu Simbel and other big-ass antiquities. They would be destroyed. The finest minds of the 60's got together and formulated a solution: a big-ass rescue effort. Abu Simbel was chopped into little pieces and reconstructed 60 meters further up the hill at a cost of about $40 million. Hurrah! Other nearby temples were similarly relocated. Artificial islands were built to house the big-ass temples of Kalabsha and Philae, ensuring a bustling business for the local felucca pilots and, in the case of Kalabsha, providing a habitat for the area's bats where they would be minimally disturbed by visitors. Other area temples were removed to even safer locations, like New York, Madrid, and Turin. It just goes to show that for every big-ass problem, there is a big-ass solution, which in turn causes more big-ass problems, etc., etc. This is how we get what we call "the modern world."

Some of Kalabsha Temple's many resident bats

I came, I saw, I defaced the monuments. Vandalism through the ages, clockwise from top left: Byzantine graffiti , a Coptic cross, defacement of reliefs by early Muslims offended by the graven images, and the engravings of nineteenth-century European visitors. All at Philae Temple.

Speaking of the modern world, Aswan is of course best known for its modern monument to big-assitude: the High Dam. When the dam was completed in 1971, Egypt downstream of Aswan was freed from the vagaries of the annual Nile flood, and the water shortages which characterized the rest of the year. Of course, the fertile silty soils that made Egypt into a center of civilization for millennia became a thing of the past, and the Nubians who lived upstream were evicted from their homes by the rising waters of the humbly-named Lake Nasser.

The dam was designed by Soviet engineers, and much of the capital required to build it also came from the Soviets. When Soviet assistance was no longer needed, the Egyptians rather ungratefully (but intelligently) threw out the Soviet advisers and reasserted their non-aligned status. But not before building a monument to Egyptian-Soviet cooperation.

It is unlikely that those who designed and built this monument really understood how profound a comment on the link between Egypt and the Soviet Union the structure would eventually be.

This large, rather unattractive edifice still stands, though both Nasser's revolutionary anti-Western rhetoric and the Soviet Union itself are consigned to the dustbin of history. Like many social, legal, and infrastructural relics of Nasser's Egypt and the Soviet Union, it is there not because it serves any purpose, but simply because nobody really knows what to do with it.

There is an elevator in the monument to take visitors to the observation ring at the top. The contract for its maintenance has been given to a company from the decadent West (Otis Elevator), but it still does not work very well; the lights come on only after the trip is over and you have exited the elevator.

One is supposed to have a special security permit in order to visit the observation ring, because the vantage point is such that one can take militarily significant photographs like the one below. But because of the centrally-planned economy's inability to provide for the population, the caretaker will take you up for about 75 cents.

I only hope that my children and grandchildren will be able to visit similar monuments to the US involvement in Egypt; monuments that speak just as eloquently to the wisdom and far-sightedness of our efforts in this country.