Abu Simbel "Meha", but this is not certain. About 20 km southwest of Abu Simbel was the small village of Ibshek, which was somewhat north of the Second Cataract of the Nile, in present-day Sudan (Wadi Halfa Salient) flooded by Lake Nubia, near the border with Egypt. Abu Simbel is in southern Egypt, not far from the border with Sudan. It is administratively part of the Aswan Governorate. The Sudanese border is only about 20 kilometers away to the southwest; the border departs from the 22nd parallel here and forms the Wadi Halfa Salient. However, the course of the border is disputed;
Egyptian temple enormous obelisks, were removed by outside governments and private collectors. This wave of Egyptomania resulted in the rediscovery of temple sites such as Abu Simbel, but artifacts and even whole temples were often treated with great carelessness. The discoveries of the period made possible the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs and the beginnings of Egyptology as a scholarly discipline. Nineteenth-century Egyptologists studied the temples intensively, but their emphasis was on collection of artifacts to send to their own countries, and their slipshod excavation methods often did further harm. Slowly the antique-hunting attitude toward Egyptian monuments gave way to careful study and