The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Not just ‘the female Indiana Jones’
The woman who saved Egypt’s doomed temples – and broke up the old boys’ club of archaeology
448pp, Scribe, T £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £25, ebook £20.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
The royal women of ancient Egypt – like its royal men – were accorded respect and veneration. The same could not be said of the patriarchal world of 20th-century Egyptology. In Empress of the Nile, American historian Lynne Olson tells the story of how one woman fought back.
Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt was born into a cultured family in Paris’s 16th arrondissement in 1913. As a child, Desroches-Noblecourt was enchanted by tales of newly discovered Egyptian treasures, such as Howard Carter’s Tutankhamun excavation, and after her lycée studies she joined the École du Louvre, where she was inspired to take a course in hieroglyphs.
In 1934, she became a project manager (unpaid, as was often the case) in the Louvre’s Egyptian antiquities department, a pioneering position for a woman and one Desroches-Noblecourt held for three years. The museum did not yet have electric lighting, and in the long winter evenings, gas flames flickered over the mummies. The Louvre was the greatest repository of Egyptian artefacts outside Egypt itself. According to Olson, the modern discipline only got started in 1822, when a Frenchman deciphered the Rosetta Stone, allowing people to read hieroglyphs for the first time since antiquity. “For the French,” Olson writes, “dominance in the study of ancient Egypt had been an important element of their national self-image since the days of Napoleon’s expedition.” Until the 1920s, Egyptians were not even permitted to train as Egyptologists.
In 1937, Desroches-Noblecourt went to Egypt for the first time, on a government-sponsored mission in the Valley of the Kings. Her billet was a small chamber in one of the tombs itself. The following year, the French government awarded her a salaried fellowship at the elite French Institute of Oriental Archaeology (IFAO) in Cairo – making her the first woman to take up the role. When war broke out, she sailed home immediately and joined a Resistance network. The Gestapo interrogated her, suspecting she was an Allied spy.
For decades after the war, Desroches-Noblecourt (she married the engineer André Noblecourt in 1941: he seems to have kept in the shadows) spent most of her time in Egypt. Olson emphasises the respect that DesrochesNoblecourt, in contrast to many male archaeologists, showed to the local labourers enlisted to work on the digs. She became a permanent curator at the Louvre. Then, in 1954, the Egyptian government and Unesco asked her to head a cultural centre for conservation and protection (CEDAE), and another chapter beckoned.
The emotional climax of the book is the race, in the early 1960s, to save a dozen temples in the lower Nile Valley from flooding by the Aswan High Dam, the project that was to be “the crowning glory” of President Nasser’s regime (“What else is left to us but to drown the past in order to save the future?” said one engineer on the job). The rescue was a pharaonic scheme, one that many reckoned impossible. In the end, 50 countries contributed nearly a billion dollars.
Desroches-Noblecourt masterminded the whole operation, as thousands of workers dismantled ancient Nubian structures stone by stone and reassembled them on higher ground. The temple of Kalabsha alone, 30 miles south of Aswan, was the size of Notre Dame.
In 1964-65, the temple of Amada took 16 months to travel 1.6 miles by railway. Olson calls the endeavour “the greatest single example of international cooperation the world has ever known”.
As the waters rose, other temples of crumbling sandstone queued for attention. After an initial triumph at Abu Simbel, with its famous 10-ton statues of Ramesses II, DesrochesNoblecourt battled crisis after crisis. She was indefatigable. When President de Gaulle accused her of committing funds to a restoration project without government authority, she stood up to him in person (which was impressive, as he was 6ft 5in and she was 5ft nothing). She continued to wield influence after the dam project. In 1967, she curated the celebrated Tutankhamun and His Times exhibition at Paris’s Petit Palais museum, visited by more than a million people.
Olson’s history makes good use of Desroches-Noblecourt’s own 1992 memoir, La Grande Nubiade, interviews that she gave until her death in 2011, and the reflections of others involved in her various struggles. The book is particularly good on context – whether of the Nile floodplains in the 10th millennium BC, the Suez conflict (during which the Egyptian government put Desroches-Noblecourt under house arrest in Cairo), or France as it moved through the dark valley of the 1930s.
The prose style is assured, only seldom careering into the purple (“exchanging the scorching heat of Egypt for the blue skies of Paris... she knew the weather was as ephemeral as the ebbing hope for peace in Europe”). The book follows a welcome trend to recover pioneering women in the social sciences (as in Frances Larson’s 2021 Undreamed Shores, about “the hidden heroines of anthropology”). Empress of the Nile is not just about a “female Indiana Jones” as its publicity blurb insists. It is also the story of all the women who have refused to take no for an answer.