In the 1960s, the world’s attention was focused on a nail-biting race against time: an attempt to rescue more than a dozen priceless Egyptian temples from drowning. But the massive press coverage of this remarkable rescue effort—the greatest of its kind in history—completely overlooked one essential element of the story: the gutsy French woman archaeologist who made it happen.
Without the intervention of Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, the temples—including the Metropolitan Museum’s Temple of Dendur—would now be at the bottom of a gigantic reservoir. A project of almost unthinkable magnitude and complexity, the rescue initially was dismissed as a fool’s errand by virtually everyone. Its enormous engineering challenges were compounded by the towering political difficulties of urging worldwide cooperation during an especially dangerous spike in Cold War tensions.
Desroches-Noblecourt refused to accept that verdict. A willful, real-life version of Indiana Jones, she refused to be cowed by anything or anyone. She’d already had plenty of experience dealing with powerful men who didn’t take her seriously. In the macho, rough-and-tumble world of archaeology, women were an extreme rarity, and she’d been shunned and harassed since her earliest days in the field. “You don’t get anywhere without a fight, you know,” she once told an interviewer. “I never looked for the fight. If I became a brawler, it was out of necessity.”
Throughout her career, Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt resembled nothing so much as a female action hero come to life. A woman who swaggered. A woman who talked and fought back. A woman who owned her power.
She even added her husband's name to hers when she eventually married!