Empress of the Nile by Lynne Olson

This was another book on my wife's book club. So, I read it. Before I read this book, I had never any overpowering urge to visit Egypt. But, now that I read this book, I decided to go see the treasures of Egypt and booked a two week tour of Jordan and Egypt. The book is about a French archeologist, Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, who was an Egypt expert. She spent her life pursuing archeology in Egypt to uncover the buried ~4000-5000 year history of the Pharonic period. Her accomplishment were many but the main accomplishment that sticks out was her initiating the prevention of inundation of the Abu Simble temple when the Aswan dam was built.

Before her urging, the result that many of the old Egyptian treasures such as many of the Nubian temples were going to drown in the reservoir created by the construction of the Aswan dam on the Nile was accepted as the price to be paid for progress expected by the construcuction of the dam. Nobody had given any thought to the loss of priceless thousands of years of history when the reservoir waters would rise and the old temples built by the Nile river upstream of the dam would be underwater. If anyone gave that loss a fleeting thought, it occured to no one to try to save them. Not until a young archeologist from France who had been working in the area, raised an alarm and started pushing for the possibility of physically moving the temples. Remember that these temples were carved into the sandstone cliffs next to the river and many of them were immense. The four statues of Rameses II are each 66 feet tall. The statues in the smaller temple dedicated to Nefertari has six statue of the king and queen, each is about 33 feet high. Anyone who suggested moving these temples and the statues must have been laughed out of the room. However, she persisted and managed to cobble together a coalition of UNESCO and a number of nations to raise funds to move the temples. Jaqueline Kennedy was a fan of Egyptian history and she also got involved and convinced her husband, John Kennedy, who was the president at the time, to fund a large chunk of the money. Anyway, it is an interesting book and describes a lot more of Christiane's life including her involvement in the French resistance during the second world war and her encounters with the Germans during that time.

My little quibble about the book is that the title "Empress of the Nile" seems a little over-reaching and there are some chapters that have nothing to do with Christiane Desroches but only with other aspects of Egyption hisgtory. Also, the book would have been better served if it had a lot more photos of the archeological digs and the rescue effort. Other than that, the book is an interesting read.