The story of Aswan Dam

The dream of taming the Nile here is old. In the 11th century, the scholar Ibn al-Haytham was summoned to Egypt by the Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim to regulate the river's floods. Convinced the scheme was impossible, and fearing the caliph's anger, he pretended to be mad, and while under house arrest from 1011 until 1021 he wrote his influential Book of Optics.

The dam in front of you finally did the job. Built between 1960 and 1970 with the help of the Soviet Union, the Aswan High Dam is one of the world's largest embankment dams, and when it was completed it was the tallest earthen dam in the world. It controls flooding, stores water for irrigation and generates hydroelectricity, and it created the Lake Nasser reservoir.

Before it, the Nile's floods could destroy whole crops in high-water years, while low-water years brought drought and famine. Even the most conservative estimates give the dam at least 200 years of service.