Sarah Belzoni in temples. Her husband would leave her alone for period of weeks or months and she would be left to speak with the local women around her in whatever language they spoke. She spent this time documenting the lives of the local women, eventually publishing "Mrs. Belzoni's trifling account of the women of Egypt, Nubia, and Syria" as part of her husband's 1820 work "Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries … in Egypt and Nubia". Her work was the first of its kind on the topic. In 1816, Sarah visited the chief's women at the Abu Simbel temples near
Structure relocation waters of Lake Nasser. In 1959, an international donation campaign began to save the monuments of Nubia: the southernmost relics of this ancient human civilisation. The salvage of the Abu Simbel temples began in 1964, and cost US $80 million. Between 1964 and 1968, the entire site was cut into large blocks, dismantled and reassembled in a new location – 65 m higher and 200 m back from the river, in what many consider one of the greatest feats of archaeological engineering. Today, thousands of tourists visit the temples daily. Guarded convoys of buses and cars depart twice a day