It was the dream of Egypt's pan-Arab nationalist president Gamal Abdel Nasser, but the inauguration of the Aswan High Dam 50 years ago came at a big cost. Opened on the mighty Nile on January 15 ...

Half a century since Egypt's ground-breaking Aswan dam was inaugurated with much fanfare, harnessing the Nile for hydropower and irrigation, the giant barrier is still criticised for its human and ...

After Egypt’s 1952 revolution, President Gamal Abdel Nasser embraced plans for the Aswan High Dam, an earth-fill embankment 111 metres high and 3.5 kilometres long. Begun in 1960 with Soviet ...

Facing impossible odds, archaeologist Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt led efforts to rescue ancient monuments from the rising waters of the Aswan High Dam. To save a colossal statue of pharaoh ...

Don’t miss. The island of Philae, 10 kilometres upstream from Aswan on an artificial lake created by a dam. The Temple of Isis and another dedicated to Hathor might be Egypt’s most romantic ...

The Aswan Dam made Lake Nasser. Egypt’s growers irrigated from it. The water table rose. The porous limestone of the Sphinx now soaks up that higher water. So the skin of the Sphinx is flaking off.

In the 1960s, many Egyptians also saw the Aswan dam as a threat to their lives — in a different way. The lake behind the dam flooded the homeland of Egypt’s Nubian people, forcing tens of thousands to ...