Jacqueline Kennedy, America’s new First Lady, persuaded her husband to help fund the rescue effort. As she told one reporter, “You don’t get anywhere without a fight, you know.”ĭesroches-Noblecourt also received help from a surprising source. 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. Willful and determined, Desroches-Noblecourt refused to be cowed by anyone or anything. It was an unimaginably complex project that required the fragile sandstone temples to be dismantled and rebuilt on higher ground. 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. But the coverage of this unprecedented rescue effort completely overlooked the daring French archaeologist who made it all happen.
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.
