Who first "conceived" the idea to build a dam???

Question

As in the water holding kind.........obviously. Did they go through with there idea?? What was the first big dam???

Is the Hoover dam still the biggest???

3 different questions right there for ya lol

Answer 1

The earliest Dams were built in Mesopotamia by the Sumerians around 3200BC on the Tigris, Zab and Euphrates rivers....the Assyrians and Babylonians who absorbed them built even bigger and more complex dams....later, the Egyptians, Hittites and Phoenicians also built dams.

Others have beat me to the Hoover dam question! lol

Answer 2

Don't know ... but I wouldn't have minded being in the pub when he came in and said "lets block off the valley and make a big lake", I reckon that's where it got it's name, when the rest of the pub said ... 'd**n' it .. will you f**k off!

Answer 3

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001334.h...

This site has a chart of the largest dams in the world. Hoover Dam is not even on the list.

New Cornelia Tailings, in Arizona is the largest US dam by volume.

http://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/History...

Answer 4

Probably the dam Dutch as an alternative 2 "sink or swim"

Answer 5

Barry the beaver

Answer 6

Beavers have been building dams since late Miocene (approximately 12 million years ago).  

As to what the first big dam, how do you define "big"?  Dams (some quite big) were routinely built in ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia...

Is the Hoover dam still the biggest?  Define "biggest".  Is it the tallest?  No.  The tallest dam in the world (300 meters or 1,000 feet) is the Nurek Dam in Tajikistan completed in 1980, when Tajikistan was a part of the Soviet Union.  Is it the heaviest?  Again, no; any dam build on a river flowing through a flatland would have to be much wider than Hoover Dam, although such dams are rarely as tall.  For example, the Krasnoyarsk hydroelectric dam, located on the Yenisey river in Russia, is 1,065 meters (3,550 feet) long and 124 meters (413 feet) tall.  The Hoover dam, in comparison, is 75% taller (726 ft / 221 m), but only 36% as long (1,244 ft / 379 m)...  

When the Hoover dam was completed in 1935, it was both the world's largest electric power generation facility and the world's largest concrete structure.  It was surpassed in both respects by the Grand Coulee Dam, located on the Columbia River in the state of Washington, in 1945.  Since then, records have been broken multiple times.  Currently, the world's largest hydraulic power generation facilities are the Three Gorges Dam in China, the Guri Dam in Venezuela, and the Itaipu Dam on the border of Paraguay and Brazil.