Empress of the Nile

by Lynne Olson

In the 13th century BCE, Ramses II—pharaoh, warrior, god-king—decided his legacy required a certain scale. He commissioned a monument not merely to commemorate himself, but to deify himself, carving it straight into the Nubian rock at the edge of his empire. He wanted people entering the kingdom on this side, to think twice before invading his empire.

Four seated figures, each some 85 feet high, sit solemnly at the entrance to Abu Simbel, like sentries to eternity. Their faces are his face—Ramses, multiplied by four—and their knees are decorated with carvings of family: wives, daughters, sons, all subordinate in scale to his majesty.

Inside, the chambers tunnel deep, lined with reliefs of imperial domination, most notably his "victory" against the Hittites at Kadesh, are retold as conquest. At the very heart of the temple, in the innermost sanctum, four gods sit: Ra-Horakhty (one who rejoices the horizon, the Sun god), Amun, Ptah, and Ramses himself. On just two days of the year, the rising sun pierces the passageways and strikes three of the four figures with light. Ptah, god of darkness, remains in perpetual darkness. That too was by design.

Three thousand years later, in the 1960s, the temple faced a different kind of darkness. What wasn't part of Ramses' design was the twentieth century and its appetite for progress.

Egypt was building the Aswan High Dam. It would generate electricity, irrigate fields, and submerge the past. The resulting reservoir, Lake Nasser, would rise hundreds of feet and stretch for 300 miles. If nothing was done, Abu Simbel would be underwater, along with 19 other ancient monument sites. One of the most important chapters in Egypt’s history would vanish beneath the very river that once defined its civilization.

Into this moment stepped Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt.

She was not Egyptian. She was French. A woman. An Egyptologist. And in the early 20th century, those three facts made her an anomaly in archaeology—a field then dominated by men in linen suit. She had grown up the daughter of an accomplished Parisian lawyer and an arts-loving mother, secured an unpaid internship at the Louvre, and willed her way into its Egyptian department. In time, she led it.

During World War II, Desroches smuggled and protected the Louvre’s antiquities while Nazi generals—including Hitler’s own art thief, Hermann Göring—prowled the halls. She knew how to hold her ground.

Egypt had a complex relationship with France, stemming from Napoleon’s expedition in 1798. Cairo’s boulevards still bore traces of Haussmann’s Paris. But after Egypt’s independence, most foreign archaeologists were shown the door. Except one: Desroches. She was invited back—uniquely, personally—by the Egyptian government.

And when the plan for the Aswan Dam emerged, it was Christiane Desroches who refused to accept the drowning of Abu Simbel. She became the Bhagiratha of this story, bent on diverting a flood.

She appealed to UNESCO and began orchestrating a solution. The temple of Abu Simbel was not only enormous—some 300,000 tons of semi-delicate sandstone—it was fragile. The grains chipped easily, eroded under strain. But the plan that took shape was breathtaking: the entire temple would be cut into eleven hundred blocks, lifted piece by piece, and reassembled on higher ground. Not just moved, but oriented precisely—so that the sacred solar alignment would still function, centuries later and dozens of meters up.

To imagine the feat: it’s as if you lifted the Kailasanatha temple from Ellora, moved it eight city blocks sideways and fifteen stories up, and put it back together so cleanly that no one could tell it had ever been touched.

That was the engineering plan. The diplomatic one was harder.

The Cold War was in full frost. The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Suez Crisis were bookends to a world perpetually tense. President Nasser of Egypt was redefining his country’s role in the postcolonial order. Prime Minister Anthony Eden was smarting from Britain’s loss of imperial prestige. France, America, the Soviets—all were watching Egypt with intent.

At one point, the Americans offered to buy some of the monuments outright—if Egypt couldn’t save them, they’d transport them to museums in the West. This infuriated Nasser’s cultural minister, Sarwat Okasha, a poet-diplomat who revered Egypt’s past and saw in Desroches a rare partner. Together, they drew up the framework for a global salvage effort.

The image is almost cinematic: in a quiet Cairo office, as Desroches types up the terms for international cooperation to rescue temples from a watery grave, Okasha plays Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on a record player, baroque violins swirling in the Egyptian heat.

In essence, Lynne Olson’s Empress of the Nile weaves together two books: the biography of Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt and the story of the international effort to save Egypt’s ancient heritage. Her prose moves through time like the Nile itself—sometimes slow and meandering through pharaonic backstories, sometimes swift and urgent during moments of negotiation and crisis.

We meet Howard Carter, the discoverer of King Tutankhamun’s tomb, in his golden moment. We encounter Jackie Kennedy, whose advocacy helped push U.S. funding over the edge. JFK, newly minted president, stewards the American contribution—and Egypt, in gratitude, offers the U.S. one of the twenty salvaged temples.

That temple—Dendur—now rests in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, where it presides in a glass atrium, thousands of miles from the Nile.

Italy sent marble cutters. Germany sent engineers. France sent its relentless Egyptologist. America sent funds. And ordinary people—schoolchildren, families—sent donations. Nehru’s government donated half a million dollars for this effort. In the end, the operation was so successful that today, unless someone tells you, you’d never know Abu Simbel was moved. (On a side note, the American cooperation was possible because of a famous law PL480, which also heralded green revolution in India)

Olson tells the story one of the great acts of cultural preservation in history with passion and deftness. And behind it all: a woman who broke into an exclusive men’s club, resisted the Nazis, and rallied the world to save a sunlit miracle from the bottom of a manmade lake.

Ramses may have carved himself into stone. But it took Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt to make him immortal.

Highly recommended and readable, you will end up loving Egypt.