Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.

What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.

If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.

You're listening to the BBC World Service and now Witness History.

All this week we're looking at the work of the United Nations Scientific, Cultural and Educational

Body, UNESCO. In the 1960s, it was UNESCO which put out an appeal for researchers and

scientists to go to Egypt to save antiquities that were threatened by the

construction of one of the largest dams in the world.

The Aswan High Dam promised electricity for an expanding nation, but the financial, social and

cultural costs were high.

Louise Hidalgo reports.

July 1970 and the completion of one of the largest dams in the world on the river Nile

at Aswan in southern Egypt.

It's taken 10 years, but finally the Aswan High Dam has tamed the waters of Egypt's lifeblood, the Nile.

All the hillsides were crowded with yelling construction workers in their long gallopier gowns,

and there, as a matter of fact fact all but pushed me and the microphone into the river as I was making a commentary.

The dam is the brainchild of Egypt's charismatic president, Gamal Abdel Nasser,

the young colonel who'd overthrown the Egyptian monarchy 20 years earlier, and for whom this monumental project is the

culmination of his dream to make Egypt great again. The dam will give Egypt cheap electricity, better irrigation and stop the Niles annual floods.

...