Lake Nasser

Lake Nasser, reservoir on the Nile River, in Upper Egypt and northern Sudan. It was created by the impounding of the Nile’s waters by the Aswan High Dam, which was built in the 1960s and dedicated in 1971. Lake Nasser has a gross capacity of 136,927,000 acre-feet (168,900,000,000 cubic metres), and its waters, when discharged downstream, have brought 800,000 acres (324,000 hectares) of additional land under irrigation and have converted 700,000 acres (283,000 hectares) from flood to perennial irrigation. The lake has been stocked with food fish.

The creation of the lake threatened to submerge a number of significant historical sites—notably the tombs and temples at Philae and Abu Simbel—under its waters. The Egyptian government appealed to UNESCO, with whose assistance many monuments were dismantled and reconstructed on safer ground. In the early 1980s, land-reclamation projects began in the desert around the lake. The northern two-thirds of the lake, lying in Egypt, is named for Gamal Abdel Nasser, president (1956–70); the southern third, in Sudan, is called Lake Nubia.