Sometime in 1961, Jacqueline Kennedy wrote her husband, the young new president of the United States, about the unprecedented archaeological race underway in Egypt’s Nubia region. The mission: to save the towering Abu Simbel temples and their four colossal statues of Rameses II. The ticking clock: the Nile waters soon to be unleashed by the opening of President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Aswan High Dam. Her memo concluded, poignantly, “If I were a young man, I would be an archaeologist and go to that region.”
Little did she know that the person overseeing the massive rescue operations was a woman: Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt. In her early 40s and already at work in Egypt for more than 20 years, the Parisian-born archaeologist had, with sharply honed persistence, managed to rise to the top of a lofty, profoundly misogynist profession, entering the field when, in France, as in most countries, it was a male-only preserve. Desroches-Noblecourt would remain involved and enthralled almost until the day she died, at 97 in 2011, the recipient of the Grand Cross of the Légion d’Honneur, a best-selling author, and a lover of the dynastic color lapis-lazuli blue.
