Aswan High Dam

A rock-fill embankment 3,830 metres across and 111 metres high, holding back Lake Nasser — one of the largest reservoirs on earth, stretching some 500 kilometres upstream into Sudan. Standing on the crest you have the lake on one side and the old river on the other, and the sheer width of the structure is the thing that registers.

Most visits are short: the viewing area, the lotus-shaped Egyptian–Soviet Friendship Monument at the eastern end, and the long view back over the water. It is usually combined with Philae and the Unfinished Obelisk, and it is worth the stop for what it explains about everything else you will see in Aswan.

For all of recorded history the Egyptian year began with the flood. The Nile rose in late summer, spread silt across the fields and receded; too high and villages drowned, too low and the harvest failed. The High Dam, built between 1960 and 1970 with Soviet engineering and finance, ended that cycle. It gave Egypt year-round irrigation, protection from both flood and drought, and roughly two gigawatts of electricity.

What it cost

The reservoir drowned Lower Nubia. More than a hundred thousand Nubians were resettled, most of them far from the river their communities had lived beside for millennia — villages, palm groves, cemeteries and the landscape itself went under the water. It remains one of the largest forced relocations of the twentieth century, and Nubian music and poetry have carried the loss ever since.

The rescue it caused

The rising lake would also have submerged some of the greatest monuments in Egypt. The response was the largest archaeological rescue ever attempted: between 1960 and 1980, UNESCO coordinated the dismantling and relocation of more than twenty temple complexes — Abu Simbel cut into over a thousand blocks and lifted 65 metres up the cliff, Philae rebuilt on a reshaped island, and several smaller temples given away to the countries that helped pay, which is why a Nubian temple now stands in New York's Metropolitan Museum and another in Madrid.