Empress of the Nile The daredevil archaeologist who saved Egypt's ancient temples from destruction

Lynne Olson

Large print - 2023

"In the 1960s, the world's attention was focused on a nail-biting race against time: Fifty countries contributed nearly a billion dollars to save a dozen ancient Egyptian temples, built during the height of the pharaohs' rule, from drowning in the floodwaters of the massive new Aswan High Dam. But the extensive press coverage at the time overlooked the gutsy French archaeologist who made it all happen. Without the intervention of Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, the temples would now be at the bottom of a vast reservoir. It was an unimaginably large and complex project that required the fragile sandstone temples to be dismantled, stone by stone, and rebuilt on higher ground. A willful real-life version of Indiana Jones, Desro...ches-Noblecourt refused to be cowed by anyone or anything. During World War II she joined the French Resistance and was held by the Nazis; in her fight to save the temples she challenged two of the postwar world's most daunting leaders, Egypt's President Nasser and France's President de Gaulle. As she told a reporter, "You don't get anywhere without a fight, you know." Yet Desroches-Noblecourt was not the only woman who played an essential role in the historic endeavor. The other was Jacqueline Kennedy, who persuaded her husband to call on Congress to help fund the rescue effort. After years of Western plunder of Egypt's ancient monuments, Desroches-Noblecourt did the opposite. She helped preserve a crucial part of Egypt's cultural heritage, and made sure it remained in its homeland"--

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Subjects
Genres
Biographies
Large print books
Published
Waterville, ME : Thorndike Press, a part of Gale, a Cengage Company 2023.
Language
English
Main Author
Lynne Olson (author)
Edition
Large print edition
Physical Description
687 pages (large print) : illustrations, map ; 22 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 627-680).
ISBN
9798885789936
  • Map of Egypt
  • Introduction
  • 1. A Childhood Passion
  • 2. Coming of Age at the Louvre
  • 3. "A Dangerous Black Sheep
  • 4. A Splendid Adventure
  • 5. Upheaval in Cairo
  • 6. "Luck Smiled on Me Again"
  • 7. Saving the Treasures of the Louvre
  • 8. Resisting the Nazis
  • 9. Shock Waves in Egypt
  • 10. "Ozymandias, King of Kings"
  • 11. Disaster at Suez
  • 12. "These Monuments Belong to All of Us"
  • 13. The Greatest Dig in History
  • 14. A Champion in the White House
  • 15. A Time of Crisis
  • 16. The First Lady Intervenes
  • 17. "Go, Baby, Go!"
  • 18. "No One Was More Resolute than She"
  • 19. The Battle for Dendur
  • 20. "A Cultural Juggernaut"
  • 21. "Bringing Them Back to Life"
  • 22. Jackie and Ari
  • 23. Operation Rameses
  • 24. Saving Philae
  • 25. Valley of the Queens
  • 26. "The Most Prestigious Living Egyptologist in the World"
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Photo Credits
Review by Booklist Review

Olson, who has written extensively about WWII, most recently in Madame Fourcade's Secret War (2019), now spotlights a pioneering French female Egyptologist. Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt fell in love with Egypt's rich history and wealth of archaeological treasures at a young age, prompting her to study the subject at the Louvre in the 1930s, a time when women pursuing archaeology was unheard of. During WWII, she bravely joined the Resistance and helped smuggle messages out of Vichy-controlled France. In the late 1950s, she embarked on what would be her most monumental achievement, leading an international coalition to move several ancient temples in Nubia out of the way of the flooding that would be brought about by the construction of the Aswan High Dam on the Nile. The most daunting of these projects was a herculean effort to shift the gigantic monuments of the temple Abu Simbel, which required carefully breaking up the large statues to relocate them. The epic project involved funding and labor from multiple countries. Desroches-Noblecourt didn't rest on her laurels after this decade-long undertaking; she continued to excavate, rediscover tombs, and publish for the rest of her life. Olson provides a gripping account of an extraordinary life.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Bestseller Olson follows up Madame Fourcade's Secret War with another scintillating biography of a woman who worked in the French Resistance against the Nazis. But Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt (1913--2011) had an even more impressive second act, according to Olson: as an Egyptologist, she spearheaded "the greatest single example of international cultural cooperation the world has ever known," a campaign in the 1950s and '60s to save Nubian temples and other antiquities from flooding caused by the construction of the Aswan High Dam in Egypt. Throughout, Olson details the misogyny Desroches-Noblecourt dealt with from her male colleagues at the Louvre and the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo, even as she reached the top of her field. Beginning in 1958, she helped raised money from dozens of nations to dismantle the temples block-by-block, transport them up the Nile, and rebuild them on higher ground. Olson also credits first lady Jackie Kennedy with helping persuade her husband's administration to support the campaign, and documents Desroches-Noblecourt's involvement in a 1967 Paris exhibition of King Tutankhamun's treasures. Enriched by fascinating digressions into Egyptian history, museum rivalries, the plundering of archaeological sites, the 1956 Suez Crisis, and more, this is a captivating portrait of a pathbreaking woman. Readers will be enthralled. Photos. (Feb.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

The life of an archaeologist who deserves to be better known. In her latest, bestselling historian Olson, who specializes in World War II--era politics (Citizens of London, Last Hope Island, Those Angry Days), turns her attention to archaeologist Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt (1913-2011). The book's first third is a delightful account of the career of an intelligent woman in early-20th-century France. Curious and self-confident, Desroches-Noblecourt became fascinated by ancient Egypt and excelled at the elite École du Louvre. "While most of her professors thought highly of her," writes Olson, "she was treated like a pariah by several of her fellow Egyptology students, all of whom were male." She shattered the myth that women could not tolerate the miseries of the Egyptian desert, and, unlike many of her colleagues, she treated Egyptian laborers with respect, a behavior that bore impressive fruit later. At age 21, Desroches-Noblecourt became project manager in the Louvre department of Egyptian antiquities, "the only woman at the time to hold a professional position in the department." Olson recounts Egyptian history culminating in the 1952 military coup, which brought Abdel Nasser to power. Infuriated at losing their colonial privileges, Britain and France, with Israel's cooperation, invaded Egypt in 1956, failing but poisoning relations with those two nations. This was the situation in 1960 when construction began on the massive Aswan Dam, built across the Nile. Its reservoir, notes the author, would destroy "hundreds of temples, tombs, churches, fortresses, inscriptions, and carvings--the fruit of half a dozen cultures and civilizations." At this point, Desroches-Noblecourt went into action. In the middle third, Olson describes her dogged but successful efforts to convince individuals and governments (including Egypt's) to preserve these priceless structures. The U.S. refused to participate until Jacqueline Kennedy persuaded her newly elected husband. Olson's conclusion digresses into other archaeological controversies and Jackie Kennedy's life, but readers will not complain. The author provides a fine account of Desroches-Noblecourt's long, distinguished career. An expert biography of the most prestigious Egyptologist of her time. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Chapter 1 A Childhood Passion Christiane's early fascination with ancient Egypt was an unusual preoccupation for a little girl from the French upper middle class, which tended to have fairly rigid, conservative ideas about girls' proper interests and behavior. But her parents had no desire to limit her horizons or encourage her to conform to the prevalent view in French society that women's roles should be restricted to those of wife and mother. That opinion was particularly strong in the aftermath of World War I, when Christiane was growing up. With more than 1.3 million of France's young men killed in the war, the country's birthrate had dropped dramatically. As a result, young women faced considerable pressure to marry and have children as soon as possible; contraception was illegal, and refusing motherhood was considered an unpatriotic act. Christiane's father, Louis, paid no attention to such ideas. He was unusual in other ways as well. A literature major in college, he was a lawyer by profession, but his true passions lay outside his work. He was a talented violinist, and Christiane recalled frequent impromptu evening duets in which he played the violin and her mother, Madeleine, who had an operatic voice, sang arias. On Sunday mornings in winter, her father would often lock himself in his office at home and study sheet music. When Christiane asked him what he was doing, he replied, "I am listening to an opera." Indeed, she added, he could read the notes on paper and hear the music in his head, an ability that left her awestruck. Somewhat surprisingly for someone of his social class, he was also a staunch man of the left, a lifelong advocate of individual freedom, tolerance, social equality, and economic justice. Madeleine Desroches, meanwhile, was one of the rare Frenchwomen of that time to have graduated from college, collecting a classics degree. Although she never worked outside the home, she was a powerful role model for her daughter--"living proof," as Christiane said, "that a woman, no less than a man, could have access to the world of knowledge." Her father, "already a feminist," supported that principle as much for his daughter as he had for his wife. "My parents were humanists," Desroches later told an interviewer. "They taught me humanist values such as respect for one another, for your neighbors, for people in general, respect for civilization. My brother and I grew up in an environment very open to culture, music, and foreign languages." For both Desroches children, curiosity about the world outside France was highly encouraged. Unlike many of their more insular compatriots, Louis and Madeleine Desroches had an eclectic group of friends, some of them intellectuals, who came from a wide variety of countries and cultures. Once, Desroches remembered, her father told her that "we were considered to be strange people because we received strangers." She added, "Believe me, there were very few Parisians at that time who felt the same way." Among the Desroches family's closest friends were Sir Norman Angell, the Nobel Prize-winning British economist, and his family. The two families often spent several weeks together in the summer. From her earliest days, the petite, dark-haired Christiane was talkative, opinionated, curious, and self-confident--all qualities that her parents encouraged. From the time they were small, she and her older brother were included in mealtime conversations about a wide variety of subjects, from current events in France and the rest of the world to literature and music. "It was a sacred ritual," she remembered. "My parents were constantly bringing up subjects that would open our minds, and they wanted us to talk about them." Baptized as Catholics, the Desroches siblings went to catechism classes, but their father encouraged them to maintain a certain skepticism about what they were taught, instructing them not to take literally everything they were told. Christiane's questioning attitude and budding determination to think for herself was reinforced at the Lycée Molière, the public high school for girls she attended not far from her home in Paris's affluent 16th arrondissement. In France, girls were not allowed to study at public high schools until 1880; even then the sexes were segregated. The Lycée Molière, which was established in 1888, was only the third girls' high school to open in Paris. The idea of public secondary schools for girls touched off a fierce controversy in France when it was first introduced. For some, the thought of girls focusing on their studies rather than on their domestic future was shocking. In the case of the Lycée Molière, the decision to name the school after the famed seventeenth-century playwright was considered even more of a scandal. Some critics on the right pointed out that Molière's sophisticated satirical comedies contained more than their fair share of racy dialogue, not considered fit for the ears of innocent young women. Naysayers on the left noted that Molière was hardly an advocate of education as a tool for the advancement of women. His plays, like Les Femmes Savantes (Learned Ladies), made savage fun of women who flaunted their learning. Education, in his view, had its place but should never be allowed to interfere with a woman's natural destiny as a wife and mother. As it happened, the Lycée Molière did indeed prove to be a seedbed for women's emancipation. It was, one student said, "a nursery for our aspirations. Our teachers encouraged us not to stop our intellectual activity after we graduated but instead to continue our studies." After leaving the lycée, a number of its graduates received university degrees and went on to become trailblazers in a variety of previously all-male professions. Among them was Jeanne Debat-Ponsan, who after acquiring her medical degree became, in 1906, one of the first women doctors in France. Another was Louise Weiss, who graduated from Oxford in 1914 and later became the founder and editor of a noted French political review, L'Europe Nouvelle. In 1930, the lycée produced two particularly stellar graduates. One was Christiane Desroches. The other was Jacqueline David, who as Jacqueline de Romilly (her married name) became one of France's leading scholars of Greek culture and language. Like Desroches with ancient Egypt, de Romilly "embraced the culture of ancient Athens with an almost romantic fervor," The New York Times wrote. She was only the second woman to be elected to the Académie Française, the elite group of political and scholarly figures charged with maintaining high standards of literary taste in the country. Six years after Desroches and David graduated from the lycée, another woman scholar, who would become internationally known herself, was hired there as a philosophy teacher. But Simone de Beauvoir lasted only three years. While the school considered itself broad-minded, its tolerance did not extend to a teacher's having an affair with a student--or in this case, students. Beauvoir was fired for seducing at least three of them. In the Desroches household, it was a given that Christiane would go to college; the only question was what she would study. At that point, neither she nor her parents entertained the idea of turning her obsession with ancient Egypt into an academic pursuit. "At the time, we never considered a career for me as an Egyptologist," she said. "It was considered a fad, a madness, not a profession." Shortly before she graduated from the lycée, her father encouraged her to think about studying art history, perhaps focusing on sixteenth-century French drawings. She could combine studies at the Sorbonne, he said, with classes at the École du Louvre, a small institution of higher learning located on the museum grounds that specialized in art history. The idea of sixteenth-century drawings, however, "bored me stiff," she recalled. So Louis Desroches made an appointment with Henri Verne--who, as the director of France's national museums, was in charge of the Louvre--to explore what other avenues his bright, lively sixteen-year-old daughter might follow in her studies. In retrospect, it might seem a little surprising that the head of the Louvre would have the time or interest to offer advice to Desroches about Christiane's educational future. He was, after all, the chief of one of the most august public institutions in France, which also happened to be the oldest, largest, and most highly regarded public museum in the world. Excerpted from Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Archaeologist Who Saved Egypt's Ancient Temples from Destruction by Lynne Olson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.