Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Archaeologist Who Saved Egypt's Ancient Temples from Destruction

Today's nonfiction post is on Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Archaeologist Who Saved Egypt's Ancient Temples from Destruction by Lynne Olson. It is 448 pages long and is published by Random House. The cover is a picture of Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt on a dig. The intended reader is someone who is interested in women's history, world history, and Egyptology. There is mild foul language, no sex, and no violence in this book. There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the dust jacket- In the 1960s, the world’s attention was focused on a nail-biting race against the international campaign to save a dozen ancient Egyptian temples from drowning in the floodwaters of the gigantic new Aswan High Dam. But the coverage of this unprecedented rescue effort completely overlooked the daring French archaeologist who made it all happen. Without the intervention of Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, the temples—including the Temple of Dendur, now at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art—would currently be at the bottom of a vast reservoir. It was an unimaginably complex project that required the fragile sandstone temples to be dismantled and rebuilt on higher ground.
Willful and determined, Desroches-Noblecourt refused to be cowed by anyone or anything. As a member of the French Resistance in World War II she survived imprisonment by the Nazis; in her fight to save the temples she defied two of the most daunting leaders of the postwar world, Egypt’s President Abdel Nasser and France’s President Charles de Gaulle. As she told one reporter, “You don’t get anywhere without a fight, you know.”
Desroches-Noblecourt also received help from a surprising source. Jacqueline Kennedy, America’s new First Lady, persuaded her husband to help fund the rescue effort. After a century and a half of Western plunder of Egypt’s ancient monuments, Desroches-Noblecourt helped instead to preserve a crucial part of that cultural heritage.

Review- A great read about the first French woman Egyptology, Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt. She loved Egypt from childhood and her parents enjoyed her passion. She fought the establishments in intellectual French to make a place for herself and other women. This book follows her whole life and career. She also fought for the temples of ancient Egypt that were forgotten and uncared for. Desroches-Noblecourt saw all the beauty and history as more than just Egypt's, it belonged to the whole world as world history. So she did everything she could to make others, especially those in power, see the beauty too. With effort, she did and we still have many temples that would have been lost to the Nile without her. I recommend this book about a fascinating woman, Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt. 

I give this book a a Five out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library.