Michael Batson

The city of Aswan in Upper Egypt is home like many of that country’s cities to much ancient history. Aswan though has something different, something other Egyptian cities do not have; a monument of more recent times which, like those from antiquity, is an equally awe-inspiring feat of engineering. I find some examples of engineering fascinating. Engineering is essentially about problem solving. Feats of ancient engineering like those in Egypt were for worship and idolatry, and about the accumulation and retention of power usually by one person, or their family. “Look what I can create” designed to instil fear into the people. Aswan’s feat of modern engineering helped to change the face of Egypt for it came on the wave of nationalism; a symbol of the country’s burgeoning independence. It was part of the new broom, out with the old and in with the new, and stood for a better future. The faces of the leadership and politics since then have changed, but the impact of what was created - much of it by a charismatic self-made technocrat and entrepreneur who became one of the world’s richest men - will be felt for the next 200 years and maybe even beyond.

Aswan (formerly Assuan or Assouan) is almost 900kms from the Egyptian capital accessible by road, rail from Cairo, and by air. To get to Aswan I got the train to Luxor taking almost all day and then hired a car and driver another day for the 420kms round trip. These days there’s a choice of trains, by day or by night and the rolling stock has been modernised but back when I made the trip it was less pristine. I knew Aswan was famous for two things both wonders in different ways; one ancient, the temple complex of Philae and the other modern, the Aswan High Dam, with the former impacted by the latter. Today it’s a busy market and tourism city of almost 400,000 inhabitants. Aswan is the ancient city of Swenett, later known as Syene, which in antiquity was the frontier town of Ancient Egypt facing south, the border with Nubia, now Sudan.

The ancient name of Swenett is said to be derived from the Egyptian symbol for “trade” or “market”. The city was built on a peninsula on the eastern or right bank of the Nile. From its position north of the first cataract it was navigable all the way to the Mediterranean Sea. Because the Ancient Egyptians oriented themselves toward the origin of the Nile in the south, and as Swenett was the southernmost town in the country, Egypt always was conceived to “open” or begin at Swenett. Given its strategic location, Swenett was equally important as a military station as well as for its position on the trade routes. Under every royal dynasty it was a garrison town; and here tolls and customs were levied on all boats passing up and down the river. The city was mentioned by numerous ancient writers including: Herodotus – whose birth city of Halicarnassus helped pioneer trade with Egypt - Ptolemy, and Pliny the elder, among others.

Aswan is home to five monuments within the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Nubian Monuments and there are a further five in the wider Aswan Governate region. The local sites include: the Old and Middle Kingdom tombs of Qubbet el-Hawa; the town of Elephantine; the Unfinished Obelisk and stone quarries; the Monastery of Saint Simeon; and the Fatimid Cemetery. The five further sites from the same UNESCO heritage area in the wider Aswan region, which covers all of Lake Nasser and territory either side of the Nile to the border with Sudan are Abu Simbel, Amada, Wadi Sebua, Kalabsha, and Philae (Island of Agilkia). These five sites contain temples moved during the UNESCO International Campaign from 1960 to 1980 to save them from flooding by the reservoir created by the construction of the dam, a feat of engineering and preservation in themselves.

Of the local sites Qubbet el-Hawa or "Dome of the Wind" is on the western bank of the River Nile. It gets its name from the dome of the tomb of an Islamic sheikh and serves as the resting place of ancient nobles and priests from the Old (4700–4200 BCE and known as the Age of the Pyramids) and Middle (4040 to 3782 BCE) Kingdoms of ancient Egypt. Elephantine is one of a group of islands forming part of Aswan city. Called Yebu or Abu by ancient Egyptians. The island is about 1.6kms long and 450m wide, and marks the border of Upper Egypt with Lower Nubia and may have received its name after its shape, which in aerial views is similar to that of an elephant’s tusk or from the rounded rocks along the banks resembling elephants. The Unfinished Obelisk is the largest constructed in ancient times and lies in the ancient stone quarries of Aswan. Unfinished, hence the name, it was carved straight out of the bedrock, weighs over 1,000 tons, and would have been 42m tall if erected. The Monastery of Saint Simeon are ruins on two levels dating from the seventh century CE from where monks ventured south to convert Nubians to Christianity, and the Islamic Cemetery contains about 1,000 tombs dating from the Fatimid Caliphate.

Abu Simbel is home to the iconic massive rock statues near the border with Sudan. Built during the reign of Ramesses II, a remarkable man who is regarded as the greatest, most celebrated, and most powerful pharaoh of the New Kingdom (3570 BCE and 3544 BCE) which itself was the most powerful period of all of ancient Egypt. He is also widely considered one of ancient Egypt's most successful warrior pharaohs, conducting no fewer than 15 military campaigns, all resulting in victories, excluding the Battle of Kadesh (Quadesh) against the Hittites. The battle with the Hittites, a race of unknown origin based in Anatolia and military rivals of Egypt was fought near the modern-day border of Lebanon with Syria, and the outcome is generally considered a stalemate. Aside from no clear victor, the battle is believed to be the largest battle ever fought involving chariots, with maybe as many as 6,000 taking part.

Amada is the oldest temple complex in Nubia. Nubia is traditionally regarded as the area of the confluence of the White and Blue Nile rivers. It was once home to the Kerma culture, one of the earliest civilisations in Africa from 4500 BCE until conquered by Pharoah Thutmose I (third Pharoah of the 18th Dynasty) of the New Kingdom of Egypt around 3500 BCE. Thutmose built many temples to himself in the Valley of the Kings and was said to have personally killed the king of Nubia in battle. Wadi Sebua (Wadi es-Sebua) is a temple complex and Kalabsha is also known as the Temple of Mandulis.

Philae is an island-based temple complex (there are actually two islands) in the reservoir of the Aswan Low Dam, downstream from the high dam and Lake Nasser. Previously the temples were located on Philae Island near the expansive first cataract on the Nile (there are six cataracts in all running form Khartoum to Aswan). During the 1960s construction of the Aswan dam the international campaign to save the monuments had the temple complex dismantled and moved to nearby Agilkia Island as part of the UNESCO project to save these temples and others before the completion of the dam proper. Agilkia was in the reservoir of the Old Aswan Dam, which itself was flooded by the new dam. Building dams at Aswan isn’t new with the earliest recorded attempt to build a dam being in the 11th century. Then as later, this was to control flooding, but the scheme was thought impractical. Then came the British in Egypt (1882 until 1956) who began construction in 1898 with the grand opening of the completed dam (known as the Low Dam) in December 1902.

The island was held in high reverence both by the Egyptians to the north and the Nubians (often referred to as "Ethiopians" in Greek) to the south, as it was said to be one of the burying-places of Osiris, the ancient Egyptian god of fertility as well as that of the dead, the afterlife, resurrection, agriculture, and also of vegetation. Osiris was the judge and lord of the dead and the underworld, the “Lord of Silence”. The islands were the centre of commerce between Egypt and Nubia. Before flooding, Philae was 380m long and 120m wide, but is now smaller. Philae also was remarkable for the singular effects of light and shade resulting from its position near the Tropic of Cancer, the Earth's northernmost circle of latitude where the Sun can be seen directly overhead. As the sun approached its northern limit the shadows from the projecting cornices and moldings of the temples sink lower and lower down the plain surfaces of the walls, until, the sun having reached its highest altitude, the vertical walls are overspread with dark shadows, forming a striking contrast with the fierce light which illuminates all surrounding objects. Being rowed about the island in a small boat my thought was twofold: the wonder of the construction and then their disassembly and exact reconstruction stone-by-stone; and the thought of river crocodiles capsizing our very small boat.

The Aswan High Dam is wonder of modern engineering. Built across the longest river in the world it is 111m high, 3.8kms long and almost a kilometre wide at the base. It took ten years to construct between 1960 and 1970 and when completed it was the tallest earthen dam in the world. It was the former Soviet Union’s largest ever aid development project. Based on the success of the existing Low Dam, then at its maximum utilisation, construction of the High Dam became a key objective of the Free Officers Movement of 1952 which had toppled King Farouk in a in a coup d'état. Keen to usher in a period of profound political, economic, and societal change in Egypt as part of their platform, the new dam with its ability to better control flooding, provide increased water storage for irrigation and generate hydroelectricity, was seen as pivotal to Egypt's planned industrialisation. It was to be a key project of the revolutionary nationalist officers now running Egypt.

Even with the old dam in place flooding of the Nile was a largely unhindered annual occurrence during late summer which would impact 95 percent of Egypt’s population living along the river’s banks. These floods brought high water with natural nutrients and minerals that annually enriched the fertile soil along its floodplain and delta. This predictability had made the Nile valley ideal for farming since ancient times but this natural flooding varied, since high-water years could destroy the entire crop, while low-water years could create widespread drought and sometimes famine of the biblical variety. Both these events had continued to occur periodically throughout history. As Egypt’s population grew (it doubled between 1947 and 1976) and technology increased, both a desire and the ability developed to completely control the flooding, and thus both protect and support farmland and its economically important cotton crop, which is world renown and often synonymous with luxury and quality, and makes up about 12 percent of the country’s economy. With the greatly increased reservoir storage provided by the Aswan High Dam, the floods could be controlled and the water could be stored for later release over multiple years.

Plans for a new Aswan dam by a Greek-Egyptian engineer, Adrian Daninos, were prepared in the early 1950s, but the then monarch King Farouk, was uninterested (a gaudy playboy he was largely disinterested in most things about his country). Rather there was the Nile Valley Plan by a British hydrologist to store water in Sudan and in Ethiopia where evaporation was much lower, was favoured. West German and French engineers also drafted plans for a dam to be financed with Western credits. Building dams at Aswan isn’t new with the earliest recorded attempt to build a dam being in the 11th century. Then as later, this was to control flooding, but the scheme was thought impractical. Then came the British in Egypt (1882 until 1956) who began construction in 1898 with the grand opening of the completed dam (known as the Low Dam) in December 1902.

Things changed with the overthrow of the monarchy. The new regime, led by the charismatic Gamal Abdel Nasser (Egypt’s second president from 1954-70, General Mohamed Bey Naguib was the country’s first, until deposed by Nasser) was convinced that the Nile waters had to be stored in Egypt for political reasons, and within two months, the plan of Daninos was revisited and accepted. Initially, both the United States and the Soviet Union were interested in helping development of the dam. Complications ensued due to their rivalry during the Cold War, as well as growing intra-Arab tensions (the Arab Cold War). Nasser, who saw himself as the leader of pan-Arab nationalism, turned first to the US for development and military assistance. But after rejecting the US terms (they wanted to station military personnel inside Egypt) he then turned to the USSR. Both the UK and the US offered but then withdrew offers of assistance for a variety of reasons, as did the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the lending arm of the World Bank.

Like other Third World nationalists, Nasser was more interested in who would aid the independence and development of his country first and foremost, and was much less interested in competing Cold War ideologies. So, like Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro, Nasser, after first approaching the West and either being rejected, ignored, or declining the terms and conditions, turned to Moscow; not because he was necessarily sympathetic towards communism, but of what it could give him; Egypt’s own path, or so he thought. In 1958, the USSR proceeded to provide support for the High Dam project which ran to the tune of USD1.2billion (equivalent to USD11.7 billion today) at two percent interest for the construction of the dam, though the final cost came in under budget costing around USD1 billion. Nasser also planned to use revenue from the nationalisation of the Suez Canal (1956) to fund the project. To acknowledge the spirit of cooperation between the two countries, Soviet architects also designed the Arab-Soviet Friendship monument 70m-high in the form of a stylized lotus flower with the coat of arms of the Soviet Union on one side and Egypt’s on the other.

The final design of the Aswan High Dam was by Nikolai Aleksandrovich Malyshev of the Moscow-Hydroproject Institute, which has designed most of the hydroelectric dams and irrigation and navigation canals that have been built in the Soviet Union and Russia since the 1930s.. Designed for both irrigation and power generation, the dam incorporated a number of relatively new features, including a very deep grout curtain below its base to protect the foundation from seepage. Although the dam’s reservoir will eventually silt up, even the most conservative estimates indicate the dam will give at least 200 years of service.

Aswan is an earth-fill dam, with an astonishing mass of 44,300,000 cubic metres. Put another way, to visualise this, if it were measured as a cube, each side would measure roughly 1590m long, or almost one mile. As planned the dam yields enormous benefits to the economy of Egypt. For the first time in history, the annual Nile flood is under human control. The dam impounds the floodwaters, releasing them when needed to maximize their utility on irrigated land, to water hundreds of thousands of new hectares, to improve navigation both above and below Aswan, and to generate enormous amounts of hydroelectric power (the dam’s 12 turbines can generate 10 billion kilowatt-hours annually). The reservoir, Lake Nasser, also supports a fishing industry. The lake itself has a gross capacity of 169 billion cubic metres, runs to a depth of 90 metres and averages 22kms across. Of the Nile’s total annual discharge, some 74 billion cubic metres of water is allocated by treaty between Egypt and Sudan. Lake Nasser backs up the Nile about 320kms in Egypt and almost 160kms farther upstream (south) in Sudan.

The first thing to note about the Aswan High Dam is it’s not really like a conventional dam at all, or not what I was expecting (there are considered to be 12 different types of dams constructed). It’s not apparent that you’re even on a dam. You drive down the road and then there’s some trees and parallel car parking. The driver pulls over and you get out and well, nothing. It’s not a great vertical concrete structure like the Hoover Dam, or a massive wide structure visible for miles like the Itaipu dam, between Brazil and Paraguay. Those two examples are more obvious structures to admire. Itaipu is the third largest hydroelectric dam in the world, and holds the 45th largest reservoir in the world (as a sign of development, four of the largest seven hydroelectric dams in the world are now in China). Until you look over the side of the Aswan dam, you’re not sure what it is and then it’s not that impressive, or that obvious a feat of engineering. You could walk down the side of the Aswan dam the slope is gentle enough. There is vegetation growing on it. A train runs across the front of the dam about half way down.

While the Soviet Union also provided technicians and heavy machinery and most of the money, in the form of a loan, to build the dam 25,000 Egyptian engineers and workers did most of the actual construction work. Soviet money paid for work to divert the Nile during construction, for land reclamation, and the foreign exchange costs of the project, including salaries of Soviet engineers who supervised the project and were responsible for the installation and testing of Soviet equipment. Actual construction, which began in January 1960, was done by Egyptian companies on contract to the High Dam Authority, and all domestic costs were borne by the Egyptians. The first stage of construction and the reservoir started filling by 1964. The High Dam (as-Sad al-'Aali) was finished on 21 July 1970 and by 1976, 12 years after it started, the reservoir named for Nasser, was finally full.

On the Egyptian side the project was led by the high-flying Osman Ahmed Osman’s company, the Arab Contractors, who had underbid his only competitor by half (the contract then being worth USD48 million). Osman was a flamboyant self-made man commonly known as el-Mo'alim ("the Boss"). He rose from humble origins to become the confidant of presidents, a politician, and ran the largest Arab contracting firm in the whole of the Middle East and the world between the 1960s and 1980s. He came to be to be one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world. After winning the contract for the Aswan Dam he carried out a series of multi-billion-dollar projects across the Arab world amassing great fortune in the process.

Good with people, he was ahead of his time in Egypt setting up pension funds and medical coverage for his employees, schemes later extended across the whole of the Egyptian public sector. A forerunner of oligarchs owning sports clubs, Osman founded Al Mokawloon Al Arab Sporting Club in Nasr City in 1973. Known locally as El Mokawloon (“The Contractors”) the club are best known for their football team which competes in the Egyptian Premier League, and was where none other than Mo Salah got his start. Osman died in 1999 but the Arab Contractors still remain one of the largest construction companies in Egypt and the Middle East. However, ties to the Osman family were severed in 2001 when the last member of the family, Ismail Osman, was removed as CEO by the Egyptian government. At the time, the company was suffering severe financial problems including a massive debt, as was the whole Egypt as a country.

One of the consequences of the creation of the dam’s reservoir was the costly relocation of the ancient Egyptian temple complex of Abu Simbel, which would otherwise have been submerged. Local inhabitants were also impacted with 90,000 Egyptians and Sudanese Nubian nomads being relocated. Over half the Egyptians were relocated to the Kawm Umbū, a valley and town of the same name, 50kms north of Aswan, a sugarcane-processing and cotton-ginning centre on the east bank of the Nile between the main valley highway and the Cairo-Aswan Railway. to form a new agricultural zone called Nubaria. The Sudanese were resettled around Khashm al-Qirbah, a town in Sudan near another dam, the Khashm el-Girba in Kassala state, miles from their previous base near the Nile. It not recorded whether they were consulted in this or just moved.

Aswan’s ancient sites have been around for centuries, while the dam has been a feature for barely half-a-century. Much of the benefit of the impact of the dam will continue for the next two centuries and after that who knows. There may be massive environmental ramifications as the natural system of the world’s longest river alters, or alters further as silt builds-up further. The monuments of the region were oved once but whatever happens on the Nile as a result of a feat of modern engineering, they are unlikely to be moved again.