In the 1960s, as Egypt built the second Aswan Dam, the monuments of ancient Nubia, including the colossi at Abu Simbel, risked vanishing beneath a lake. Backed by UNESCO, an international coalition of archaeologists, celebrities, politicians, and engineers succeeded in moving them. Whole temples were cut off their rock bases and lifted with hydraulics, or removed in segments from cliff-faces and sinking islands, for reassembly on higher ground. The struggles involved, American author Lynne Olson’s book Empress of the Nile makes clear, were fiendish. The engineering problems were considered impractical, the politics foolhardy. For the sake of flood regulation and hydroelectricity, ancient buildings seemed an acceptable loss. Rousing the political will to save them took scholarship, conviction, charm, and sheer nerve. In short, it took French Egyptologist Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt.
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