The massive geographic changes wrought by the Aswan High Dam necessitated a remapping of Egyptian space through new narratives of time and family. The state and many ordinary Egyptians hailed the dam's benefits to the nation's progress toward technological modernity in the late 1950s and early 1960s. `Abd al-Halim Hafiz's ode "The High Dam" blared in mundane public spaces (Fernea and Fernea 1991), extolling the dam's challenge to colonialism and its ability to restore time in Egypt: "Let's build the land's future and return it to its youth." Simultaneously, the dam threatened the loss of Nubia, prompting government sponsorship of preservation and documentation campaigns through archeology, art/literature, ethnography, and photography. These campaigns fixed Nubia as "the past" (Winegar, 177) but also as female, through different conceptions of the relationship of that past to other layers of the past and contemporary people and objects. Yusuf Chahine's 1968 film about building the dam (al-Nass wal-nil; a Soviet co-production) depicted the different cultural, social, and environmental costs of the project for Egyptians, Nubians, and Soviets at work on the dam. The film specifically contrasted the dam's modernity with the inadequacy of women's social rights in Egypt, Soviet Russia, and Nubia. Understanding the struggles over the High Dam requires historians to disentangle competing narratives of time and family used to describe cultural heritage, riparian technology, and national progress. Christopher Witmore has recently called for clarification of "the measurement of time, a succession of dates--chronos--[from] the nature of time, which, like the weather, is much more chaotic and unpredictable--kairos" (AHR, December 2009, 1396). Different notions of the family helped to naturalize conceptions about the nature of time in these debates, this paper argues; a particular conflation of space, time, and gender made palatable an event suspended between the promise of national development and the suffering of humans and the environment. 2010 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the start of building the High Dam. Although aspects of the story have been documented in different disciplines (i.e., art history, sociology, engineering, political science), the contours of popular engagement with the dam project have not been explored. Such a study of the popular cultural politics of the dam challenges the conventional picture of cultural politics in the 1960s as either wholly dictated by the state (i.e., the Arab Socialist Union or newly subsidized universities) or wholly oppositional to it (the communists and Islamists).