Meet the woman who helped save Egypt's temples from certain doom

In the early 1960s, an international campaign to save some of Egypt’s most priceless antiquities from drowning captured front-page headlines around the world. But the massive press coverage of this extraordinary rescue operation overlooked the gutsy female French archaeologist who made it happen. If it hadn’t been for Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, more than 20 temples, most of them several thousand years old, would have been swallowed up in the floodwaters of a gigantic new dam.

In the eyes of the Egyptian government, the loss of the treasures, while lamentable, was necessary: The Aswan High Dam was needed to boost agriculture and provide electricity for Egypt’s exploding population. “What else is left to us,” said one young engineer working on the project, “but to drown the past to save the future?”

Desroches-Noblecourt, the acting chief curator of Egyptian antiquities at the Louvre Museum in Paris and an adviser to the Egyptians, begged to differ. She appealed to Egyptian officials not to resign themselves to this catastrophic loss of their cultural heritage.

“It was like preaching in the desert,” she recalled. “I was constantly told, ‘You’re wasting your time. Why are you doing this? These are not even French monuments.’” To her, that argument was nonsense: “I was fighting for something that belonged to me as a citizen of the world, and also for the honor of humanity.”

Desroches-Noblecourt was advocating nothing less than the most difficult archaeological rescue in history—a project of almost unthinkable magnitude and complexity, aimed at moving the fragile sandstone temples to higher ground. The enormous engineering problems were matched by the daunting challenge of seeking international cooperation at a time of escalating global political tensions. In a world increasingly divided, Desroches-Noblecourt’s vision was universally regarded as quixotic and hopelessly delusional. But that didn’t stop her.

A brawler by necessity

All her life Desroches-Noblecourt had rebelled against men who had tried to tell her what she could—and couldn’t—do. In the macho, rough-and-tumble world of archaeology, women were still an extreme rarity, and, as the first prominent female archaeologist in France, she had been shunned and harassed since her earliest days in the profession.

In 1938, when Desroches-Noblecourt was named the first female fellow of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology, an elite Cairo-based research center for the study of ancient Egypt, her male colleagues rose up in revolt, refusing, she later said, to “share the library or even the dining room with me. They said I would collapse and die in the field.”

A member of the French Resistance during World War II, she faced down several Nazi interrogators following her arrest in December 1940 on suspicion of espionage. She refused to answer the Germans’ questions and scolded them for their bad manners. Rendered speechless by her effrontery and unable to come up with solid evidence against her, they finally let her go.

Late in her life, she told an interviewer, “You don't get anywhere without a fight, you know. I never looked for the fight. If I became a brawler, it was out of necessity.”

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Desroches-Noblecourt’s fight to save the temples began in the late 1950s, following the announcement by Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser of the Aswan Dam project. After months of relentless lobbying, she finally won the support of UNESCO, the United Nations cultural agency, and Sarwat Okasha, Egypt’s cultural minister, who in turn persuaded Nasser to approve the rescue plan.

In 1960, the Louvre curator and her allies embarked on a public relations blitz to inform the world of the threat to the antiquities and to raise money to cover the astronomical costs of their rescue. From the start, they faced herculean obstacles.

Most engineering experts believed that no matter how much money was poured into the project, the temples could not be moved without irreparable damage. Of greatest concern were the majestic twin temples of Abu Simbel, erected on a cliff overlooking the Nile by Egypt’s most notable pharaoh, Rameses II. Guarded by four 66-foot-high statues of Rameses carved into the rock, the complex was built around 1250 B.C. and thought to be as “as fragile and precious as the finest crystal.”

Compounding the project’s uncertainty was strong anti-Nasser sentiment throughout the West, which began with the 1952 military coup that brought him to power and ended de facto British and French control of Egypt. Nasser’s adamant refusal to ally his country with non-Arab nations and his acceptance of Soviet aid were particular sore points for Western governments, including the Eisenhower administration, which not only refused to support the salvage effort but actively tried to prevent it.

Unlikely savior

Without massive financial help from Western countries, particularly the United States, the project was doomed. Then an unlikely savior, Jacqueline Kennedy, appeared on the scene. Just a few months after her husband became president in 1961, the new First Lady lobbied him to reverse U.S. opposition. Thanks to her influence, President John F. Kennedy, in the nick of time, called on Congress to authorize enough money to insure the rescue. Ultimately, some 50 nations joined the United States in providing the more than $80 million needed, making the operation the greatest example of international cultural cooperation the world has ever known.

By the summer of 1968, the race against time had been won. The Abu Simbel temples, cut up into large blocks and reassembled like an enormous Lego set, had been installed in their new setting, without one stone lost or seriously damaged. The same was true of the other, smaller temples. Egypt's Nasser was so grateful he gave Jacqueline Kennedy and the U.S. the Temple of Dendur, which now sits in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. 

Ironically, the only two women to play crucial roles in this landmark rescue apparently had no idea that the other had been a key participant in the fight. Both Desroches-Noblecourt and Kennedy had worked behind the scenes. Neither had sought or received public attention for their achievement, caring less about the credit than getting the job done.