In the hot southern Egypt sun, a monument to modern ambition bisects the Nile — a massive rockfill dam once hailed as a triumph of engineering, anticolonial defiance and national pride. But beneath the surface of this vast construction lies a deeper, more complex story — one of displacement, Cold War deal-making, pan-Arab solidarity and shifting landscapes both physical and political.

In her current book project, “Stone by Stone: The Landscape Politics of Egypt’s Aswan High Dam, 1956–1973,” historian Nancy Reynolds draws on a rich trove of archival materials, oral histories, ecological studies and cultural texts to offer a humanistic interpretation of one of the 20th century’s most iconic infrastructure projects.

What is your book about?

“Stone by Stone” is a history of the building of the Aswan High Dam, which was erected by Egyptians in the 1960s with Soviet aid and cuts across the Nile near Egypt’s southern border with Sudan. My book tells the environmental story of this colossal construction project through the region’s sociopolitical history as the dam site and the Egyptian political regime re-formed into a new landscape in the global contexts of the Cold War and postcolonialism.

At the time the largest human-engineered rockfill structure, the hydroelectric dam required technical and construction innovation because of its scale and the conditions of its site in the river. What I demonstrate in reconstructing the project’s history is how managing the security and uncertainty of the dam reconfigured the political power of the regime domestically, effects that spilled out to both the Arab world and the Cold War.

As fascinating as that engineering and political story is, what drew me to this project is the wide array of relationships and responses people had to the dam. Families in Cairo piled into their cars for vacations and drove up to the dam to see for themselves the building of this monumental structure. University students volunteered for construction labor over summer holidays. Even political prisoners and some Nubians celebrated the dam as they weighed development promised by the project against their dispossession by the state. Nasser scheduled the diversion of the Nile into its new bed through the powerhouse, a key milestone of the dam’s construction that was lavishly celebrated in 1964, to coincide with the May 15 commemoration of the nakba to signal that the dam would build Arab power to support Palestinians. 

Of course, only three years later in June 1967 Nasser’s project of Arab Socialism would itself be defeated, the dam threatened and Palestinian return and statehood set even further back. So, although the High Dam was successfully completed by 1971 and remains intact today, its story centrally features failure — the collapse of water systems, the flooding and salting of productive fields, the spread of disease, the violence of accidents. Many experiences of building the dam were ambiguous, disorientating and unstable. “Man and rock were one,” as one worker recalled.

How did the Aswan High Dam figure in Nasser’s vision for Egypt’s future — what he prioritized and what he sacrificed?

The Aswan High Dam was crucial to Nasser’s emergence on a global stage as a key player in the Non-Alignment Movement in the 1950s. Caught in a Cold War battle over funding the dam’s construction – promised loans from the World Bank, the United States, and the United Kingdom were revoked after Nasser recognized the PRC and bought arms from Czechoslovakia in 1955 — Nasser first nationalized the Suez Canal to use its tolls to finance the dam (and this provoked a pivotal war in 1956) and later negotiated with the Soviet Union for technical and financial support for construction. These funding struggles positioned Nasser as a tremendously popular leader both in Egypt and in the Global South more generally, and the dam also transformed Aswan in the 1960s into a hub of transnational activism and anticolonial world-making — a dynamic provincial city of the Global South networked and competing with Paris, Algiers, Tangier and Rabat, and Accra. A major argument of the book is that along with producing this popularity, the construction of the dam helped to strengthen the Egyptian state in distinctive ways. But as a social history, the book also argues for the importance of incorporating a broader range of people into the High Dam’s story. Not only Nasser had a vision — and a means to implement it — for the work of the dam.

In addition to often compromising the safety of workers at the construction site, Nasser and officials who supervised the dam certainly sacrificed Nubia, a historically, linguistically and ethnically distinct region of the Nile Valley that was permanently flooded by the new reservoir. More than 100,000 Egyptian and Sudanese Nubians were forcibly relocated. The ongoing trauma of this dislocation — a Nubian scholar recently called it an epistemicide (see Menna Agha’s “It Is Not a Desert Where Grandmother Sits”) — is one way that we see the construction of the dam continuing to build Egypt’s necropolitical present.

What types of sources are you looking at?

The Aswan High Dam produced a sprawling archive of published propaganda; speeches; diplomatic, ministerial and intelligence correspondence; environmental impact studies; ecological investigations; records on the UNESCO archaeological salvage campaign; technical and engineering reports; memoirs and oral histories; travel accounts; field notes and dig diaries; press coverage; drainage maps; photographs; and an unusually rich corpus of literature and film.

I have researched at more than 10 state, museum and special collection archives in Egypt, France, the United Kingdom and the United States. Although my first book was anchored in intensive research in Egyptian state archives, records of the Egyptian Ministry of the High Dam remain closed due to security concerns. Upriver states have recently renewed contestation of Egypt’s historic claims to Nile waters, and Ethiopia leveraged Egypt’s political turmoil after 2011 to build its own Grand Renaissance Dam, radically altering Nile water-sharing relationships that made the High Dam possible. The Egyptian state also canceled partial restoration of Nubian lands promised after 2013. Although these contexts shaped some parameters of my research, they also indicate the urgent timeliness of a multidimensional history of the Aswan High Dam.

Tell us about your approach to writing this history, as a humanist studying a massive engineering project?

Many histories of large dams are told as either stories of engineering risk and innovation or as dramas of high politics. These are both important aspects of the Aswan High Dam, but such a monumental and momentous project drew responses from across Egyptian society. People wrote powerful novels, essays, memoirs, petitions. They designed new museums and produced experimental films and artwork. Controversial salvage work to document and “preserve” Nubia involved vast survey teams of anthropologists, archaeologists, botanists, geologists, zoologists, artists, architects and international organizations such as UNESCO, which developed its World Heritage Program from its Nubian monuments campaign. Much environmental history is framed in big scales of time, which can minimize human experience and agency. But given the rich set of experiences around the dam’s construction, I wanted to focus on where and how humans entangled with the rest of nature — in other words, to write a social history of the environmental and political change created by and through the dam.

Historians draw on a variety of methods from disciplines across the humanities and social and natural sciences to chart and explain change over time. To understand the High Dam story, I needed capacities that I didn’t have when I started the project. I initially trained as a sociocultural historian and have spent much of the past decade expanding the methodological scope of my research into the environmental humanities. I was able to do this thanks to two Mellon initiatives. A Mellon New Directions Fellowship took me back to the classroom in 2017-18 to study geology, botany and environmental history at WashU. I owe so much to the generosity and pedagogical skill of the faculty here who accepted me into their courses. Co-directing a Mellon Sawyer Seminar with literature scholar Anne-Marie McManus on the material, political, and ecocritical dimensions of spaces considered wastelands afforded me crucial training in the environmental humanities and ecocriticism. Our Sawyer Seminar grew out of a longstanding Faculty Seminar funded by the Center for the Humanities, and I am especially grateful for that institutional support and for the overlapping communities of scholars in those workshops who helped me think more broadly as a humanist. 

Headline image: View of Egypt taken during ISS Expedition 25. Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, 2010.