In the early 1930s, two public works projects changed the face of agriculture and land distribution in the south of Egypt. A barrage was constructed at Naj` Hammadi in 1930 and in 1933, the Aswan dam (khazan Aswan) was raised for a second time. The result of these two projects was the arrival of perennial irrigation and increased opportunities in land reclamation in the area of Upper Egypt stretching Qina to Aswan. For the first three decades of the twentieth century, this region had been excluded from state-sponsored irrigation and the cotton-based agricultural economy that it supported. The exclusion of Egypt’s south from perennial irrigation shaped the history of this region in distinct ways: Land landowners and private agricultural companies, like the Egyptian Sugar Company, exercised tremendous economic and political authority, sugarcane flourished as a cash crop alternative to cotton, and private parties funded the construction of infrastructure. The completion of the Naj` Hammadi barrage and the second heightening of the dam signaled the state’s intervention in the allocation of water and the expansion of cultivable land in the south of Egypt. Using documents from the Egyptian Ministry of Public Works, specifically the Irrigation Department, and articles in the Egyptian press, this paper traces the significance of water, and its increased availability in southern Egypt in the 1930s and 1940s, pursuing the following questions: How did newly available water transform economic relations between peasant cultivators, large landowners, and the state? Second, how did this water change land tenure patterns in Upper Egypt? Finally, did the role of water in peasants’ relationship to land and agricultural production shift as its availability increased?