Aswan High Dam

The monument that ended ancient Egypt's calendar. Until the twentieth century the Nile rose every summer, spread over the fields and went down again, and the year was reckoned by it. The dams at Aswan stopped that, and the High Dam finished the job. There is nothing ancient to see here, and in our judgement it still explains more than any other stop on an Aswan day: why Philae stands on the wrong island, why Abu Simbel was cut into blocks, and why the Egypt you see from a Nile cruise no longer floods.

Toby Wilkinson calls the inundation the Nile's annual miracle: summer rain in the Ethiopian highlands swelled the Blue Nile and sent the flood north, and by early August it was clearly noticeable in the far south of Egypt. It ended with the first Aswan Dam in the early twentieth century and its larger twin, the High Dam, in the 1960s. Since then, as Barry Kemp puts it, the flood has been dammed back and let out gradually, so that the river stays at a constant level and never overflows its banks. Kemp dates the opening to 1970; Saphinaz-Amal Naguib gives its inauguration as January 1971.

Naguib describes the dam as one of those events that change a culture quickly. It radically altered Egypt's ecology, made the old agricultural calendar meaningless, and caused most of the rituals tied to the flood to disappear. Some survive in the Coptic calendar, which grew out of the ancient one: the Night of the Drop, when a divine drop falling from the sky was said to start the Nile's rise, once coincided with the river's lowest point.

The water held back by the dam became Lake Nasser, and it covered most of Lower Nubia. That forced an international rescue. Temples were dismantled and moved to higher ground, and some were given to the countries that helped. Philae's temples were rebuilt on the neighbouring island of Agilkia, landscaped to resemble the original. Kalabsha's 13,000 blocks were moved in 1962–63 to a new site just south of the dam. Much of what we know of prehistoric Nubia comes from the rescue excavations of the 1960s. Other things could not be saved: the mud-brick fortresses of the second cataract were only partly excavated before they were lost under the lake.

A long rockfill wall, a road across it, Lake Nasser on one side and the Nile on the other. Stand on it and look both ways. To the south is a man-made lake; to the north, the river running at the level the dam decides. Our suggestion is to come here after Philae or before Abu Simbel, so that the monuments and the water that moved them are seen on the same day.

The dam is not in the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities catalogue, and we have not found an official visitor page for it. Most visits are a short stop on the Aswan sightseeing loop, often with the Unfinished Obelisk and Philae.