Hi, I'm Mike Troy, host of the American Revolution podcast on the Airwave Media Network.

This podcast is the origin story of the United States, how we went from colonies ruled by a king to the Democratic Republic that we have today.

The American Revolution podcast tells the story of the revolution from beginning to end.

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I hope you will join me today on the American Revolution podcast.

The following episode is a recording from a live stream that I did about Abu Simbel,

focusing on the small temple for Nefertari and the larger

context of these temples, what Ramesses and his government were trying to achieve. If you'd like to

see the video version of these discussions, those are available now on the podcast's YouTube channel.

Just follow the link in the episode description. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoy.

So first things first, I'm going to talk about the little temple. We call it a small temple,

but it's still pretty freaking huge as far as, you know, your average building goes. In the doorway here, you can see the very faint figure of a man sitting on a chair.

That gives you a rough sense of the scale of these statues.

They are several meters high.

This is still a large monument, even though we call it the small temple.

From the façade, two things to understand. We have four figures of Ramesses the second, and then two of Nefertari,

which sounds kind of strange because we often describe this as being Nefertari's temple.

Despite the fact that the monument is partially devoted to the queen and to the goddess

Hattor, it is still in the Egyptian way of looking at things, it is still important that the

king be physically present because before anybody else, the king is the primary connector or

intermediary between mortals and the gods.

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