Completed in 1970 with Soviet backing, the Aswan High Dam impounded the Nile to form Lake Nasser, one of the world's largest reservoirs. It gave Egypt control over the river's annual flood, expanded irrigated farmland and generated large amounts of hydroelectric power. Its reservoir displaced tens of thousands of Nubians and submerged ancient sites, prompting an international campaign to relocate the temples of Abu Simbel. The dam also ended the natural silt deposition that had renewed the delta's soils.
It is a defining example of the twentieth-century high-modernist megaproject, reshaping settlement, agriculture and the urban energy supply of a whole nation while displacing communities.
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