The Nubians – a people without a homeland
Nubia was once a mighty kingdom and a country of a high culture. It
saw 4,000 years of history before it gradually sank under the rising waters
of the Sadd el-Ali (High Dam) reservoir during the 1960s, while the Nubian
people as a whole suffered compulsory evacuation. The 50,000 Nubians who
were living in that part of Nubia which lies in the Sudan and so were of
Sudanese nationality were resettled at Khashm el-Girba on the Atbara river in
the Sudan, while the 70,000 Egyptian Nubians were given new land at Kom
Ombo, 50 km north of Aswan (see Chapter 6). The expulsion of the Nubian
people from their homeland had already begun with the construction of the
first Aswan Dam in 1902 and its heightening in 1930.