The Karameh Dam is located in the Jordan Valley between Lake Tiberias and the Dead Sea. It is just north of the village of Karameh which lies some 20 km south of the provincial town of Deir Allah. The dam provides a storage reservoir of 55 million m(3) in the Wadi Mallaha, a minor tributary of the Jordan River. The purpose of the reservoir is to store surplus winter flows in the King Abdullah Canal to allow further development of irrigation at the southern end of the Jordan Valley immediately north of the Dead Sea. This paper describes the project and the design philosophy behind the development of the chosen embankment cross-section.