The thin straight lines across the giant statues of Abu Simbel, in southern Egypt, aren't cracks. They're saw cuts from the 1960s, when the whole temple was cut into blocks and moved up the hill to escape a new lake.

• ✓ICOMOS Monumentum vol. 17 (1978), "The Salvage of the Abu Simbel Temples"
• ✓UNESCO Nubia campaign
• ✓Ahram Online 580591 (sun festival dates)
• ✓UNESCO International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia, https://whc.unesco.org/en/activities/173/
• ✓en.wikipedia "Abu Simbel"

These thin lines run across the giant statues of Abu Simbel, in Egypt. They look like cracks. They're not. In the 1960s, a new dam on the Nile was about to sink this temple under a lake. So engineers sawed it into blocks, some weighing 30 tons. Even the king's faces came off in one piece. No saw was allowed to cross them. Then they rebuilt it all, over 200 feet higher, facing the same way. So twice a year, the sunrise still lights the statues deep inside, about a day later than it used to. Even the cliff is new: a hollow concrete dome, covered in rock to look like a mountain. So these lines aren't damage. They're the scars of the move that saved it. Subscribe for a fact every day.