City Libraries, City of Gold Coast

Empress of the Nile, the daredevil archaeologist who saved Egypt's ancient temples from destruction, Lynne Olson

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

individual biography

illustrationsportraitsmaps

index present

non fiction

Empress of the Nile

bibliography

Lynne Olson

the daredevil archaeologist who saved Egypt's ancient temples from destruction

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 from drowning in the floodwaters of the gigantic new Aswan High Dam. But the massive press coverage of this unprecedented rescue effort completely 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 gigantic reservoir. It was a project of unimaginable size and complexity that required the fragile sandstone temples to be dismantled, stone by stone, and rebuilt on higher ground. Desroches-Noblecourt refused to be cowed by anyone or anything. As a brave member of the French Resistance in World War II, she had survived imprisonment by the Nazis; in her fight to save the temples, she had to face down two of the most daunting leaders of the postwar world, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and French president Charles de Gaulle. After a century and a half of Western plunder of Egypt's ancient monuments, Desroches-Noblecourt (ie. a Westerner) helped preserve a crucial part of its cultural heritage (ie. from the Egyptians themselves), and, just as importantly, made sure it remained in its homeland