San Isidro Museum - The Origins of Madrid is presenting an exhibition from 1 October to 29 March 2026, offering a journey through the mainly graphic documentation on the Temple of Debod and its surrounding area, prior to its dismantling and transfer to Elephantine Island.
The exhibition brings together images from various national and international archives, revealing previously unseen aspects of the monument and its condition in the mid-20th century. The material also shows the people who lived in the surrounding area and, like the temple, were evacuated to places far from the great lake that the construction of the Aswan High Dam would create.
The exhibition is divided into three sections: The Alert, The Documentation and The Transfer. In addition to the photographs, Nubian ethnographic objects collected by members of the Spanish Mission working in Nubia between 1960 and 1965 as part of the major rescue campaign initiated by UNESCO to save the temples and communities threatened by the construction of the Aswan High Dam are also on display.
The tour begins with the studies carried out by the Centre for the Study and Documentation of Ancient Egypt (CEDAE) on the temple before it was donated to Spain by the Egyptian Republic. The state of conservation of the monument was recorded after decades of submersion in the water of the reservoir and its dismantling and subsequent excavation were documented.
The documents include a photographic record of the temple, an archaeological description of the surrounding area, copies of its hieroglyphic inscriptions and photogrammetric images of the reliefs in the vestibule and central chapel of the temple, taken by the French National Geographic Institute, which also participated in the work.
The parallel ethnographic documentation work carried out by the American University in Cairo, which focused on the Nubian communities that inhabited the affected territory, including those of the Kenuz Group, to which the inhabitants of the Debod district belonged, can also be highlighted.
e Debod.
