The Nile

by Toby Wilkinson

  By 1895 a design for the dam had been agreed (Willcocks had proposed a curved solution, but had been outvoted, so the dam would be straight), but construction was delayed by the Anglo-Sudanese war—waged, not coincidentally, for control of the Blue and White Niles. Only after the Battle of Omdurman on 2 September 1898 effectively brought the conflict to an end could the building of the Aswan Dam begin. Construction commenced that December, and on 12 February 1899, Queen Victoria’s son the Duke of Connaught laid the foundation stone of the greatest engineering project to be undertaken in Egypt since the building of the Great Pyramid four thousand years before.

  If the engineering challenge was immense, so was the cost. The contract, awarded to the firm of Sir John Aird & Co., was worth the enormous sum of £2 million. It was agreed that the Egyptian government would pay in half-yearly instalments of £78,613 over a period of thirty years, and would issue government bonds to finance the deal. The financier Ernest Cassel took over the bonds and paid cash to the contractors by means of monthly certificates. At its peak, the workforce reached nearly fifteen thousand men: the British supplied specialist blacksmiths, machine fitters, locomotive and crane drivers, carpenters and masons; the Italians sent expert stonecutters; while the Egyptians provided the unskilled labour. Work was carried on for ten hours a day, and on rest days all nationalities came together for football matches. An entire village, complete with its own water supply, was built to accommodate the workers at the building site, a remote and inhospitable spot some four miles south of Aswan. Two railways, serviced by up to sixty trains a day, were constructed to transport building materials to the site. The dam was built of granite rubble masonry bound together by Portland cement. In total, 75,000 tons of cement mortar and 28,000 tons of coal, all imported from England, went into the project. To allow construction of the main dam, five separate coffer dams had to be built to regulate the Nile’s flow through the Cataract.

  The Aswan granite proved not as strong in places as had been hoped, and had to be dug out with pickaxes to locate firm foundations for the dam. This unexpected complication added a staggering £1 million to the overall cost of the project. But, notwithstanding such challenges, the Aswan Dam was completed in June 1902, a year ahead of contract. In a nice symmetrical touch, the finishing stone was laid by Louise of Prussia, the wife of the Duke of Connaught, on 10 December 1902, just four years after construction had begun. Almost immediately, bitter disagreement about the dam’s pros and cons started.

  The advantages were clear to see and swift to be felt. The dam, together with a barrage at Asyut built in parallel (to supply an irrigation canal in Middle Egypt), brought immediate benefits to Egyptian agriculture. Thanks to perennial irrigation, cotton production increased fourfold from 1877 to 1907, making Egypt the third largest producer in the world. Sugar cane also became a major export crop for the first time. Bigger agricultural yields led to a rapidly burgeoning population: Egypt’s 6.8 million people in 1882 had grown to 11.3 million in 1907. The British Consul-General in Cairo, Lord Cromer, confidently declared that “the foundations on which the well-being and material prosperity of a civilised community should rest have been laid,”16 and the Aswan Dam was a great source of British national pride—despite the fact that it had been built by the sweat of thousands of Egyptian brows. Finally, on the plus side, the dam generated electric power and facilitated safe navigation through the Cataract—via a system of four locks—for the first time in history.

  On the down side, as feared, the dam had caused fields and villages upstream to be submerged and the government was forced to pay out over half a million pounds in compensation to those affected. Indeed, local scepticism about the dam’s benefits had been deep-seated from the start. The early years of construction had been marked by a series of low Niles, and “it was no wonder that the fellahin ascribed the disaster to the building of the barrage. The spirit of the Nile, they believed, was wrathful at the attempt to curb and confine his waters.”17 Monuments as well as communities were drowned as the dam rose in height, the start of a sorry process of cultural despoliation in the name of progress that continues to this day. And the very character of Egypt was changed for ever. As Archibald Sayce commented wistfully, by 1907 “the quietude of Upper Egypt was also gone. The population had multiplied and the waste-places of the desert were waste-places no more. The railway was now running to Assuan, the river was full of steam-craft, and it was difficult to escape from the postman or telegraph boy. Prices had risen accordingly …”18 As Muhammad Ali had intended, the construction of the Aswan Dam marked Egypt’s emergence into the modern world … for good and ill.

  One of the dam’s individual casualties was William Willcocks himself. Disgruntled and disillusioned, he had left the project in 1897, even before building began. He launched a hate campaign against his many critics and ended up in a Cairo courthouse in 1921, convicted of defamatory libel and sedition, bringing an illustrious career to an inglorious end.

  Despite all the drawbacks, pressure soon mounted for the Aswan Dam to be raised in height, to permit yet more irrigation and a further increase in agricultural production. The wily Ernest Cassel, scenting an opportunity to augment his already considerable fortune, had bought a huge tract of low-lying desert north of Aswan, and he used his influence in Whitehall to lobby successfully for the raising of the dam. No matter that “this meant the disappearance of most of the temples of the Nubian Nile and of all the villages adjoining them.”19 Desert was turned into farmland and Sir Ernest netted a tidy profit from cotton and sugar cane. A second raising of the height of the dam followed between 1929 and 1933, so that eventually the reservoir upstream held five times the volume of water it had done in 1902. In 1945, a plan was discussed to raise the height still further, but it was not to be. The old Aswan Dam was a symbol of Egypt’s colonial past, a past that was fast disappearing in the aftermath of war. Egypt’s new nationalism demanded an entirely new structure, one that looked resolutely to the future.

  In 1959, seven years after the military coup that toppled Egypt’s last king, General Nasser announced to the Egyptian people a project to build a vast new dam that would harness the full power of the Nile. Al-Sadd al-Ali, the High Dam, would be an awesome structure indeed: two-and-a-quarter miles long, rising 366 feet above the river bed; over half a mile wide at its base and broad enough at its top to support a dual carriageway; and incorporating a hydroelectric plant with six turbines capable of producing 2.1 gigawatts of electricity. Fearing the further rise of Egyptian nationalism in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis, Western nations refused to help Nasser realise his ambitious plans. The Soviet Union, by contrast, had no such scruples. So, when the High Dam was opened on 15 January 1971, after eleven years of construction, its summit would be crowned by a monument to Soviet–Egyptian friendship—cocking a snook at the old colonial dam a few miles downstream.

  Even more effectively than its predecessor, the High Dam has regulated the flow of the Nile, consigning the annual inundation—the natural phenomenon that built Egypt—to the history books. There are no more high or low Niles, no more drought-induced famines. As well as benefiting irrigation agriculture, the reservoir created by the High Dam, Lake Nasser, also supports a huge fish population, providing lucrative catches for commercial fisheries. But the ill effects, too, have been magnified. While the original plans of the first Aswan Dam allowed silt to pass through its sluices during the inundation, the High Dam traps all sediment behind it. The fertility of Egypt’s soil has been rapidly depleted, forcing farmers to use chemical fertilisers which, in turn, are blamed for a rise in cancers and other illnesses. With less fresh water to flush salts out of the soil, salinity has increased throughout Egypt, turning fields into unproductive wastelands and causing immense damage to ancient monuments. Lake Nasser has permanently changed the climate, causing rain to be more frequent in southern Egypt than before, and has provided a perfect breeding-ground for snails and mosquitoes, leading to an increase in schistosomiasis and malaria. The
confident assertions of the High Dam’s cheerleaders, back in the late 1950s, now have a hollow ring. As one son of Aswan laconically put it, the High Dam “is slowly killing Egypt.”20

  While the long-term effects of controlling the Nile are still being felt in towns and villages the length of Egypt, the impact of the first Aswan Dam and the High Dam on the landscape of the Cataract region has been profound and irreversible. Lake Nasser extends for over three hundred miles behind Aswan, deep into Nubia. Its creation led to the permanent submersion and loss of countless ancient monuments. An international Nubian Rescue Campaign, led by UNESCO, managed to move thirty-five major temples; uprooted from their original locations, they now find themselves marooned in the shadow of the High Dam or in Western museums. Only the great temples of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel remain in situ—or, rather, cut up and reassembled a couple of hundred feet higher up, above the lake’s shore, in an operation which took four years and cost forty million dollars.

  The threats posed by the High Dam to Egypt’s cultural heritage prompted international action, but the drowning of countless Nubian villages went almost unnoticed. Whole communities were forcibly relocated to shanty towns in and around Aswan, with little or no compensation. (On this point, Nasser’s revolutionary government proved less obliging than Egypt’s erstwhile colonial authorities.) As a result, the demography of the Cataract region is once again a vibrant mixture of Egyptian and Nubian, just as it was before the time of the pharaohs. The Nile has been tamed and history has come full circle.

  OVER THE MILLENNIA, the Cataract region has welcomed expeditions and armies, quarrymen and dam-builders. Today, it is tourists who come in their hundreds of thousands to marvel, not just at the natural beauty, but at the monuments. Ever since the first dahabiyas of well-heeled trippers sailed up the Nile in the 1820s, one place above all has drawn them to the Cataract region: a place synonymous with the beauty and majesty of Egypt, a place whose stone walls tell of a long history as pharaonic shrine, Roman frontier and Christian refuge. That place is Philae, jewel of the Nile. As an early European visitor put it, “There are four recollections of a traveller, which might tempt him to wish to live for ever: the sea view of Constantinople, the sight of the Colliseum by moonlight, the prospect from the summit of Vesuvius at the dawn, and the first glimpse of Philae at sunset.”21

  Philae has always been a place of pilgrimage. In Ptolemaic times, it was linked in the Egyptian imagination with the neighbouring island of Biga, burial place of Osiris. Philae and Biga were within hailing distance of each other but Biga, with its looming bulk and rounded granite outcrops, hiding the interior of the island from view, had the greater air of mystery.

  Because Biga was hallowed ground, off limits to all but a few priests, worshippers descended instead on Philae to petition Osiris’ sister-wife Isis for a touch of the Nile’s resurrective powers. Just as Isis had helped to resurrect her dead husband, so, it was hoped, she would pour out equally revivifying blessings on her devout followers. Isis grew rapidly in popularity, eclipsing the traditional Cataract deities of Anuket, Khnum and Satet. By the time the Roman writer Diodorus Siculus visited Philae, in the first century BC, the cult of Isis was the most powerful in Egypt and her island sanctuary was regarded as the holiest place in the whole country.

  Every ten days, the goddess’s image was ferried across to Biga to unite her with her husband, a splendid piece of theatre watched from Philae’s western colonnade by hundreds of pilgrims. Once a year, from 8 to 26 December, the time of sowing new seed, an even more impressive spectacle celebrated the death and rebirth of Osiris during the Festival of Choiak. The culmination of the festivities was the ferrying of Isis from Philae to Biga on 18 December for the ceremonial burial of Osiris. Eight days later, Osiris’ victory over death and the revival of his powers were marked by the erection of a great maypole-like pillar, again to much rejoicing by onlookers. As a visitor to Philae from distant Alexandria noted, “Whoever prays to Isis at Philae becomes happy, rich, and long-lived.”22

  The stones of Philae are carved with numerous inscriptions, ranging from pilgrims’ graffiti to priestly incantations. Among them is the very last text ever written in Egyptian hieroglyphics, a simple prayer carved by a priest of Isis on 24 August AD 394. Over the following sixty years, a poignant collection of inscriptions left by members of a single family charts the last gasps of pagan religion and the end of pharaonic culture. On 2 December AD 452, on the eve of the Festival of Choiak, two brothers, Smet the Elder and Smet the Younger, carved the last inscription in Egypt’s native language, written in the demotic script. Four years later, the brothers, whose name means “staff of Isis,” carved their final testaments, but this time in Greek. Thereafter the priests fell silent and their prayers ceased to echo around the stones of Philae. The reason is found in another inscription a short distance away: it reads, “The cross has conquered. It always conquers.”23 Christianity had come to Philae, displacing millennia of pharaonic religious observance.

  In practice, it was not quite so clear-cut. As the stronghold of a powerful priesthood, Philae remained a cult centre of Isis-worship even after Egypt was forcibly Christianised under the Edict of Theodosius in AD 379. Philae had a bishop from the early fourth century onwards, and for a time the priests of the old and new religions lived side by side. The transformation from pagan sanctuary to Christian shrine was a gradual process, and it took some two hundred years for Christianity to become the dominant faith in the Cataract region. During this time, Philae’s ancient cults were sustained by pagan tribes from the south, the Blemmyes and Noubades, who came to the island as late as AD 567 (thirty years after the temples had been officially closed) for an act of traditional worship. Eventually, with the final extinction of Egyptian religion, Philae was reborn as a Christian stronghold from which monks led missions to convert the heathen Nubians.

  The last bastion of pharaonic religion, the Cataract region was also the last area of Egypt to be conquered by the Arabs. Because of its contacts with Christian tribes to the south, Philae remained a thorn in the Arab side. The area as a whole was only fully converted to Islam under Saladin (in the late twelfth century AD). But its ancient sanctity proved impossible to dislodge. When Napoleon’s army arrived in 1799, Philae’s atmosphere of holiness was not lost on the French troops. Seventy-five years later, Amelia Edwards was at her most poetic when describing Philae’s special, antique charm:

  The approach by water is quite the most beautiful. Seen from the level of a small boat, the island, with its palms, its colonnades, its pylons [gate-towers], seems to rise out of the river like a mirage. Piled rocks frame it on either side, and purple mountains close up the distance. As the boat glides nearer between glistening boulders, those sculptured towers rise higher and even higher against the sky. They show no sign of ruin or of age. All looks solid, stately, perfect. One forgets for the moment that anything has changed. If a sound of antique chanting were to be borne along the quiet air—if a procession of white-robed priests bearing aloft the veiled ark of the God were to come sweeping round between the palms and the pylons—we should not think it strange.24

  Given Philae’s particular appeal, it is not surprising that the threat to the island posed by plans for the first Aswan Dam created an outcry. As Sir William Garstin had made clear in 1894, “the dam, if made, can only be made at Aswan. If the dam be made at Aswan, the Temple must either be raised, removed or submerged.”25 His own recommendation was the removal of Philae’s ancient monuments to the neighbouring island of Biga. Others involved in the dam project soon weighed in with their own suggestions. Sir Benjamin Baker advocated leaving the temple on Philae but raising it to a height above the highest floodwater. The Egyptologist Somers Clarke, unable to countenance such interference with an ancient monument, recommended leaving Philae alone, to be submerged. Willcocks, as contrary as ever, seriously suggested that submergence for six months of the year would be good for Philae, citing “the really preserving effect of the freshly flowing Nile
water.”26

  In the end, it was decided to leave Philae where it was. Archaeologists grudgingly agreed on three conditions: first, that the entire site be subject to a thorough scientific investigation; second, that a water-tight coffer dam be built around Philae island, to protect the temple; and third, that the Aswan Dam should not be above a certain height. Eager to press on with the dam project, the Anglo-Egyptian government assented to all three demands. But Philae was far from safe.

  The subsequent raising of the height of the Aswan Dam, not once but twice, drove a coach and horses through the agreement, and by 1933 all but the cornices of the temple were submerged. The temple had to have underpinning work to save it from collapse. Flinders Petrie, the father of Egyptian archaeology, wrote bitterly that economic interests—turning “barren acres into land worth millions”27—had caused the temple’s ruin. Rose Macaulay went further, lamenting, “We should have kept it as it was: to drown it was one of the more sordid enterprises of utilitarian greed.”28 With such influential backers, the question of Philae would simply not go away, and the debate over the temple’s fate resumed.