Early dam building took place in Mesopotamia and the Middle East. Dams were used to control the water level, for Mesopotamia’s weather affected the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and could be quite unpredictable. The earliest known dam is situated in Jawa, Jordan, 100 km northeast of the capital Amman. The Ancient Egyptian Sadd Al-Kafara at Wadi Al-Garawi, located about 25 km south of Cairo, was 102 m long at its base and 87 m wide. The structure was built around 2800 or 2600 BC as a diversion dam for flood control, but was destroyed by heavy rain during construction or shortly afterwards. The Romans were also great dam builders, with many examples such as the three dams at Subiaco on the river Anio in Italy. Many large dams also survive at Mérida in Spain.
The oldest surviving and standing dam in the world is believed to be the Quatinah barrage in modern-day Syria. The dam is assumed to date back to the reign of the Egyptian pharaoh Sethi (1319–1304 BC), and was enlarged in the Roman period and between 1934 and 1938. It still supplies the city of Homs with water. The Kallanai is a massive dam of unhewn stone, over 300 m long, 4.5 m high and 20 m wide, across the main stream of the Kaveri river in India. The basic structure dates to the second century AD. The purpose of the dam was to divert the waters of the Kaveri across the fertile delta region for irrigation via canals.
In the Netherlands, a low-lying country, dams were often built to block rivers in order to regulate the water level and to prevent the sea from entering the marshlands. Such dams often marked the beginning of a town or city because it was easy to cross the river at such a place, and often gave rise to the respective place’s names in Dutch. For instance, the Dutch capital Amsterdam started with a dam through the river Amstel in the late twelfth century, and Rotterdam started with a dam through the river Rotte, a minor tributary of the Nieuwe Maas. The central square of Amsterdam, believed to be the original place of the 800-year-old dam, still carries the name Dam Square or simply the Dam.
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