Project description
Uncovering ancient Egypt’s earliest desert dam
Considering how important water is to life, its management in arid environments has always been crucial. This can be seen in ancient Egyptian communities beyond the Nile Valley that adapted to scarce water resources. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the WADIS project will investigate the Wadi al-Garawi Dam, the earliest large-scale dam in Africa. It will use hydrological modelling, GIS analysis, 3D reconstruction, and archaeological evidence to determine why it was built, how it functioned, and what role it played in Egypt’s desert landscapes. The project aims to reconstruct ancient environmental conditions and analyse the dam’s links to broader social and political networks. The project’s overall goal is to offer new perspectives on sustainable water management in drylands past and present.
Objective
Securing and managing water in extreme environments was crucial for the success of ancient societies—a challenge still urgent in today’s arid regions. Despite extensive research on the Nile Valley, the strategies used by communities in surrounding deserts to cope with scarce water and environmental stress remain poorly understood. At the centre of this question is the Wadi al-Garawi Dam (WaGD) in the southeast of Cairo, the earliest large-scale dam in Africa and unprecedented in Pharaonic hydraulic engineering. Despite its scale, WaGD has never been systematically studied, leaving unresolved why it was built, how it functioned, and its role in desert societies.
The WADIS project pioneers a multidisciplinary investigation of this unique structure, asking why ancient Egyptians invested in such an exceptional hydraulic system outside the Nile Valley. Using hydrological modelling, GIS-based spatial and network analysis, 3D reconstruction, and comparative studies, it will: (1) reconstruct palaeoenvironmental and hydrological conditions to test the dam function; (2) examine its construction, operation, and integration within socio-political and logistical networks; and (3) develop a replicable framework to study desert water management in Egypt and other arid regions.
Hosted at Uppsala University, the project includes a secondment to HiSoMA Lab (France), and short visits to the University of Freiburg (Germany) and the UNESCO Chair in Science and Technology for Cultural Heritage (Egypt), providing advanced training in archaeology of water management, geomatics, and hydraulic modelling to consolidate the fellow’s independence and transferable expertise.
WADIS will transform understanding of desert water strategies by situating the WaGD within debates on environmental stress, technological innovation, and state power, while also providing new tools to study resilience in arid landscapes and significantly enhancing the fellow’s capacity to lead EU interdisciplinary research.
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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751 05 Uppsala
Sweden
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