The Aswan High Dam has been an incredibly powerful force in the shaping of Egypt. A force so all-encompassing is invariably composed of both destructive and creative aspects.

First of all, the dam destroyed the annual Nile flood (thus making the ancient Egyptian gods of the flood, Khnum and Hapi, conclusively obsolete... and thus chee-to eating couch potatoes). The Nile used to burst its banks, bringing moisture and dark rich silt onto the shores where Egypt's crops are grown. Irrigation and pumps (note the pipes coming out of the river in the photo below) water the fields today, but only a fraction of the fertilizing silt from deeper Africa now makes if past Aswan.




With the Nile flood, though, came its intrinsic unpredictability. Such instability almost certainly caused hardship for the Nile bank farmers. Although the ancient Egyptians had ingenious ways of measuring each year's flood after the fact (as the Nilometer on the right shows, by means of the graduated steps along the inside of the pit) in order to estimate farmers' yields for tax purposes, they were at a loss when it came to alleviating the suffering brought about the variability itself. No more flood = no more instability, from that point of view anyway.


The dam also destroyed the majority of Nubia. The Nubians are an African people who lived on the banks of the Nile in a region straddling modern Egypt and Sudan. The filling of the reservoir south of the dam essentially submerged the major population centres of their homeland. The photo on the left shows a poster we saw at a schoolhouse in a Nubian village that had been relocated by the Egyptian government to an island in the Aswan area. It shows the original extent of the Nile (bluish-white line), the new banks (yellowish-white lines), and the original major settlements (red squares).

Finally, the dam destroyed most of the Ancient Nubian and Ancient Egyptian archeological monuments in the area. Some of the most significant, though, like Abu Simbel (which I mentioned in a previous post) and the Philae temple dedicated to Isis (see photo below) were salvaged by an international effort headed up by UNESCO. The temples were literally chopped into blocks, moved to higher ground, and reassembled.



Of course, none of this would have come to pass if there weren't those who believed the benefits of the dam outweighed the damage done. The creative power of the structure is evident in the jobs and skills it brought to the people of Egypt, the electric plants which now power large swathes of the Middle East, and the new farmland created along the now expanded shores of the river.

One final example of the dam's creative power, though, was its ability to help spark the Suez crisis. Egypt decided that the only way it could fund the dam was to nationalize the Suez canal, at that time in the hands of British and French corporations. Now... anything written about the protracted conflicts between Egypt and Israel runs serious risks of over-simplification... but one version involves the British and French urging the Isrealis to invade and then stepping in themselves as peacekeepers to create a buffer zone (very conveniently) along the canal.

The dam itself is impressive, though not particularly interesting visually (nothing like the Hoover dam, for example). Again, no pictures were allowed, this time on the grounds that it is a militarily sensitive site. Understandably, as a flood ensuing from the destruction of the dam would essentially wipe out all of Egypt. Presumably for this reason, the dam is incredibly massive (containing enough construction material to build 17 Great Pyramids) and its sides slope down so gradually that its intrinsic stability makes it look like it could almost naturally be part of the surrounding rock.