Joseph Bonomi the Younger into debt and was eventually happy to accept a modestly paid commission to accompany Robert Hay on an expedition, via Malta, to Egypt in 1824. This began a lifelong interest in Egyptology. From 1824 to 1826, he was a member of Hay's expedition where he sketched many antiquities. At Abu Simbel in 1825, Bonomi – responding to Hay's demands for great accuracy – devised a drawing frame (a viewfinder-type device equipped with a sight and a string or wire grid) to help them draw the temples' interior decorations. The expedition then moved on to Kalabsha, where Bonomi laboured to produce
Rock relief parts of the country, generally those away from the main centres of population, as Abu Simbel was. There are a group of figures surrounding an image of Mentuhotep II, who died in 2010 BC and was the first pharaoh of the Middle Kingdom. Before they were cut away and moved, the colossal figures outside the Abu Simbel temples were very high reliefs. Other sculpture outside temples cut into the rock qualifies as rock reliefs. The reliefs at Nahr el-Kalb commemorate Rameses II, and are at the furthest reach of his empire (indeed beyond the area he reliably controlled) in modern