ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Lake Moeris and the Aswan Dam: Geo-History and Colonial Terraforming in Egypt, 1880-1910

• In Event: Late Nineteenth-century Sciences

English Abstract

This presentation traces the influence of geo-historical research and reasoning in the scrapped, original plans for what would later become the Aswan dam: The use of a pre-existing depression in the Libyan desert, supposedly the site of a mythical ancient Egyptian reservoir. Using newly uncovered archival sources, it argues that the idea of a changing landscape in geological and human history naturalized the idea of changing the landscape in the nineteenth-century present.

After 1882, British engineers were brought in by the colonial government to renovate what they saw as faulty and crumbling irrigation infrastructure in order to eventually expand the cultivation of cotton. Instead of merely fixing Ottoman-Egyptian infrastructure, however, an American lay Egyptologist argued they should instead restore Herodotus’ Lake Moeris. The supposedly massive, man-made lake in the desert had since apparently vanished, promoting speculations about the decline of the ‘oriental’ climate. In order to reconstruct the geo-history of the depression, geologists, archaeologists, and the British irrigation engineers swarmed in to see if it really was the ancient lake and whether it could be used to store water. Though hardly known today, the project was widely discussed in the Egyptian and Western press and its historicization claimed and contested by Egyptian writers of the nahda, or Arab renaissance movement. Eventually, the colonial Department of Public Works dismissed the lake project, because it would be too expensive. Instead, they came up with a different scheme: a dam at Aswan.

Author

• Anna Simon-Stickley, Freie Universität Berlin