Philae's temples stand today on an island the ancient builders never used, moved there stone by stone to save them from a dam.
The problem the dam created
The old Aswan Dam, completed in 1902 and raised twice after, put Philae under water for most of each year; the Aswan High Dam, finished in 1970, threatened to submerge it permanently. Divers and tourists had already been visiting a partly flooded temple for decades before the final threat arrived.
Cutting the temple apart
Under a UNESCO-coordinated campaign in the 1970s, engineers built a coffer dam around Philae, pumped it dry, and cut the temple complex into more than forty thousand numbered blocks. Each block was cleaned, catalogued and ferried about five hundred metres to Agilkia Island, which was reshaped with terraces and retaining walls to match Philae's original contours before the pieces were reassembled in their original relative positions.
Finished, and still called Philae
The rebuilt complex opened in 1980. Visitors are on Agilkia, landscaped to resemble the island that is now permanently underwater, and by common usage everyone, including Egypt's antiquities authority, still calls it Philae. It stands alongside Abu Simbel as one of the largest heritage rescue projects ever completed.