WATANI International
24 July 2011
Christiane Desroches was born in Paris in 1913. As a child, she was fascinated by the treasures of the pharaohs, especially by Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922.
Christiane’s father wished her to study 18th-century art but she said, “that bored me stiff”. Instead, she studied hieroglyphics, archaeology and philology at the Louvre, and was appointed to the department of Egyptian antiquities at the museum.
She left for the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo (IFAO) where, as a woman in her mid-20s, she was unwelcome. “I had encountered a certain amount of misogyny at the Louvre,” she said later. “But nothing like at the IFAO. The men there didn’t want to share the library or even the dining room with me.” Even so, she became in 1938 the first Frenchwoman to lead a dig.
As WWII set in, Christiane went back to France where she joined the Resistance and hid the Louvre’s Egyptian treasures in free areas of France. In 1942, she married a childhood friend, with whom four years later she had a son, and remained in France.
Confronting the French president
On 23 July 1952, the revolution which overthrew the monarchy in Egypt erupted, and the country went through radical changes which resulted in considerable disarray.
Among the sectors which severely suffered was the archaeological service and, in 1954, Noblecourt was asked by the French culture ministry to return to Egypt and set up the Centre for Documentation of Scientific Research in Cairo, to train a new generation of Egyptian archaeologists. But Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1956 brought on the military attack by Britain, France, and Israel against Egypt, which ended when the US forced their troops to withdraw. The result, however, was that relations soured between these countries and Egypt.
In 1959, with the Aswan High Dam project under way, the then Culture Minister Sarwat Okasha approached Christiane Desroches Noblecourt, informing that Egypt needed to move urgently to rescue the ancient temples of Nubia which were bound to drown under the dam waters. Noblecourt proposed that a rescue plan be organised through UNESCO which accordingly launched a world-wide appeal to save the monuments and succeeded in securing international funds for the project. She also promised help in the name of France for the rescue of the Amada temple which posed a particular challenge.
She returned to Paris where she had to place the matter before President Charles de Gaulle, reputedly of a quick temper. The famous story goes that he shouted at her: “How dare you engage France in this without the authorisation of my government?” But she was quick to retort: “And you, did you demand the authorisation of Pétain’s government on 18 June 1940? No! You judged the circumstances required you to take a stand. Well, that’s what I’ve done.” Weeks later she had the funding she needed.
Saving the temples
A race against time began to save the ancient temples before they were inundated forever.
The greatest concern were the rock temples of Ramesses II and his queen, Nefertari, at Abu Simbel, which were erected around 1250BC. The temples had to be moved to a safer location, while preserving the phenomenon which occurred twice every year, on 21 February and 21 October. On these two dates the rays of the sun entered the temple door and penetrated the depth of the temple to shine on the faces of statues of the gods Amun-Ra and the falcon-headed Ra-Horakhty located at the furthest end of the temple. The god of the underworld, Ptah, who stood next to them, was left shrouded in darkness.
Six companies from France, Germany, Sweden and Egypt were charged with the mission of raising the temples. The process cost USD36 million and was completed in 1986. The temples were sawed into 1,042 blocks and raised 64 metres up the sandstone cliff on which they had stood for some 3000 years. The only difference between the new position and the old was that the sun rays now fall on the face of the Pharaoh in the innermost shrine on 22 February and 22 October.
Other sites proved equally challenging. The temple of Kalabsha, with its immaculate relief carvings, was the second-largest to be relocated. A German team dismantled it stone by stone, and moved them almost 54km near to Aswan.
Perhaps the trickiest of all, however, was the rescue overseen by the French at Amada, where one of Egypt’s most richly-decorated sites lay—a temple covered with brightly-coloured, painted reliefs. Block-by-block dismantling would have utterly destroyed the reliefs. The temple was thus encased in a superstructure and hewn from the desert floor in its entirety. This vast relic was then placed on three railway lines, and rolled gently to safety, 3.6km away, over a period of six months. The process had to be of necessity so slow that, as the temple inched forward, the rails left behind were lifted up and placed in front of it again.
UNESCO’s world heritage sites
The mammoth rescue project had, for UNESCO, sown the idea that certain monuments were not the property of individual countries, but of humanity itself, as “world heritage” sites. Four years after the Nubian temples were saved the UN introduced the convention, today ratified by 187 countries, protecting world heritage sites.
Another important consequence was the improvement in Franco-Egyptian relations, which in turn led to the organisation of a Tutankhamun exhibition at the Louvre in 1967, which attracted a record number of visitors. It was the first time a substantial number of pieces of the treasure were displayed in Europe. “The English weren’t pleased,” Noblecourt recalled. “They had discovered the treasure in 1922. But they forgot that England had refused to help save the Nubian temples.” Noblecourt guided De Gaulle through the exhibition.
In later life Noblecourt lived in a richly-decorated apartment in Paris. But she never added an Egyptian object to the furnishings: “Everybody would think I’d stolen it from some tomb,” she said. She wrote extensively on ancient Egypt, publishing well into her 90s.
Christiane Desroches Noblecourt received the prestigious gold medal of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and was awarded the Grand Cross of the Légion d’Honneur, the highest decoration in France. Her husband predeceased her.
She died on 23 June 2011 at 97.