Empress of the Nile

This biography tells the story of Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, a French archaeologist who overcame entrenched sexism to become one of the world's foremost Egyptologists and the driving force behind the twentieth century's greatest cultural preservation effort: the rescue of ancient Egyptian temples from the floodwaters of the Aswan High Dam. The book also reveals the little-known role of Jacqueline Kennedy, the First Lady of the United States, in securing American support for the campaign.

The book opens in December 1940. The twenty-seven-year-old Desroches, the Louvre's acting curator of Egyptian antiquities, was pulled off a train by the Gestapo, detained, and interrogated for hours on suspicion of spying. She was in fact both an Egyptologist and a spy but refused to be intimidated, scolding her interrogators for their rudeness. She was released the next day. The author traces Desroches's passion for ancient Egypt to childhood visits with her grandfather to the Obelisk of Luxor in Paris and to the Louvre's Egyptian galleries. The 1922 discovery of Pharaoh Tutankhamun's tomb mesmerized nine-year-old Christiane and set the course of her life.

Desroches grew up in a progressive Parisian family. Her parents, Louis, a lawyer, and Madeleine, a classicist, encouraged intellectual independence, defying norms that pressured French women toward marriage. She enrolled at the École du Louvre, the museum's school of art history, where she studied under Father Étienne Drioton, deputy curator of the Egyptian department. Drioton became her most important mentor, arranging for her to deliver a public lecture on Tutankhamun at twenty, for which her father coached her all night on speaking techniques. Drioton also championed her appointment to the Louvre's Egyptian antiquities department at twenty-one. In 1937, now directing the Egyptian Antiquities Service in Cairo, Drioton arranged a study mission for Desroches at Deir-el-Medina, an ancient village whose artisans had built the pharaohs' tombs. There she absorbed careful documentation methods and first saw the temples of Abu Simbel, carved into cliffs by Rameses II in the thirteenth century B.C. In 1938, she became the first woman awarded a fellowship at the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology (IFAO) in Cairo and made significant discoveries during an excavation at Edfu.

World War II interrupted her fieldwork. She packed 389 crates of Egyptian artifacts for the Louvre's evacuation and, during the fall of France in June 1940, made three trips to transport them to safety. Under the occupation, she joined the Musée de l'Homme resistance network, one of the first organized groups in occupied France, which published underground newspapers, ran escape lines for Allied soldiers, and gathered intelligence. The network was betrayed in early 1941; seven leaders were executed and others imprisoned. Desroches narrowly escaped. She married André Noblecourt in 1942, though they lived apart until the war ended. Louvre director Jacques Jaujard protected her permanent appointment against Vichy officials who sought her dismissal.

The postwar years brought seismic change to Egypt. A nearly bloodless coup on July 22, 1952, led by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser and his Free Officers, established Egyptian self-rule for the first time in over two thousand years. The new government asked UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) to help build an Egyptian research center for Egyptology. Desroches headed the mission, establishing the Documentation and Study Center for the History of the Art and Civilization of Ancient Egypt (CEDAE) in 1955, which paired young Egyptian scholars with Western archaeologists.

CEDAE's most urgent concern was the monuments of Nubia, a region along the Egyptian-Sudanese border facing destruction from Nasser's planned Aswan High Dam. The reservoir would submerge scores of antiquities, including Abu Simbel. In January 1955, Desroches arranged for Luther Evans, UNESCO's director general, to visit the temples. He declared they must be saved, but no action followed. The 1956 Suez Crisis, in which Britain, France, and Israel attacked Egypt after Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, nearly destroyed her campaign. She was expelled from the country but was soon invited back under special exception.

Two breakthroughs transformed her effort into a global campaign. In late 1958, Sarwat Okasha, Egypt's new minister of culture, was galvanized when James Rorimer, director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, suggested buying endangered temples, an offer Okasha found insulting. Desroches convinced him that UNESCO could organize an international rescue, and together they persuaded Nasser to approve a plan offering donors access to excavation sites and gifts of small temples. Desroches typed the formal request on Okasha's portable typewriter on April 4, 1959, and Nasser signed it that evening. The second breakthrough came from René Maheu, now UNESCO's deputy director general, who secured the organization's approval. In March 1960, André Malraux, France's minister of culture, launched the international appeal. More than forty expeditions from nearly twenty countries descended on Nubia in the largest coordinated archaeological dig in history.

Funding the Abu Simbel rescue proved the campaign's critical challenge. The U.S. government, hostile to Nasser, initially refused to contribute. Jacqueline Kennedy intervened, sending President John F. Kennedy a lengthy memo early in 1961 urging support. On April 4, the president asked Congress for $4 million. Jacqueline personally lobbied skeptical legislators, and the measure passed narrowly. In early January 1963, she wrote the president another detailed memo, and he committed $12 million in Egyptian pounds specifically for Abu Simbel. After his assassination, the House reversed the appropriation, but the Johnson administration discovered an obscure legal provision allowing use of surplus local currency, and the funds were secured. More than fifty countries ultimately contributed.

The dismantling and reconstruction, carried out between 1964 and 1968 by a consortium of six engineering firms, was a feat of extraordinary precision. Italian marble quarry workers used handsaws to make cuts no wider than a quarter inch on fragile sandstone. Approximately 1,100 blocks were extracted and reassembled at a site two hundred feet higher, oriented so that twice a year a sunbeam would penetrate the sanctuary as Rameses had intended 3,200 years before. The project finished eighteen months ahead of schedule. At the reopening on September 22, 1968, Okasha largely omitted Desroches's role, but Maheu credited her as the person who "pulled me in, guided me, and took me on the most marvelous adventure of my life" (272).

Alongside the rescue campaign, Desroches pursued landmark projects. Her 1963 book Tutankhamen: Life and Death of a Pharaoh, featuring the first color photographs of the tomb's treasures, became an international bestseller translated into twenty-two languages. She curated groundbreaking Tutankhamun exhibitions in Paris, London, and the United States that drew millions and transformed museum culture. In 1976-1977, she orchestrated "Operation Rameses," bringing Rameses II's mummy to Paris for forensic examination with full head-of-state honors. Egypt awarded the Temple of Dendur to the United States for its contributions to the campaign. Jacqueline Kennedy fought for the temple to be placed in Washington as a memorial to JFK, but Thomas Hoving, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, prevailed. The temple opened at the Met in 1978.

The campaign's final act was rescuing the Philae temple complex, a sacred center of the ancient cult of the goddess Isis damaged by flooding since 1902. Twenty-two nations contributed to the effort. The inauguration on March 10, 1980, completed the twenty-year campaign. Of its three principal architects, only Desroches was present; Maheu had died and Okasha had been dismissed from government.

After retiring from the Louvre in 1983, Desroches launched restoration and excavation projects in the Valley of the Queens, the burial ground for pharaohs' wives and children. An international effort led by the Getty Conservation Institute restored the wall paintings in Queen Nefertari's tomb. She produced eleven books in her final decades, several of them bestsellers. In 2009, UNESCO honored her at a gala in Paris, with Director General Irina Bokova crediting Desroches with originating the concept of world heritage. Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt died on June 23, 2011, at ninety-seven.