When they took over, they changed the country's name to Democratic Kampuchea. After the country was invaded by the Vietnamese in 1978, it was renamed the People's Democratic Republic of Kampuchea. Aswan High Dam One of the great engineering feats of the 20th century was the construction of a dam across the Nile River in Egypt. The chief benefit of the dam to Egypt was the ability, for the first time in Egypt's history, to control the annual flooding of the Nile. With the advent of the Aswan High Dam, thousands of new acres have been brought into cultivation.
Water is released when needed for irrigation.
The dam also generates a huge amount of electricity. The chief drawback of the dam is that it holds back the silt that was formerly carried northward and deposited on lands along the riverside, thus enriching the soil. About 40 million tons of silt used to be deposited yearly by the Nile floods. The dam is located in southern Egypt at Aswan. The waters it holds back form Lake Nasser, named after the president of Egypt during whose rule the dam was planned and built.