Lynne Olson - Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Archaeologist Who Saved Egypts Ancient Temples from Destruction

T he train had just pulled into the station at Moulins, a town in central France, when a German in a black SS uniform burst into the compartment in which Christiane Desroches was sitting and demanded to see her papers. Her German-issued identity card, which named her as the Louvres acting curator of Egyptian antiquities, was in perfect order, but the SS man thought otherwise. He stared at it, then at her, and shouted, Get off! Pulling the twenty-seven-year-old Desroches to her feet, he hustled her off the train.

It was December 12, 1940a freezing cold day. Desroches spent the next several hours huddled in an icy cell at the Gestapo headquarters in Moulins. At last she was escorted to a large room containing several Germans in SS uniforms, who were leaning back in their chairs, their boots on a desk, smoking cigars.

One of them asked her in French if she spoke German. Although she did, she replied, Not only do I not speak it, I dont understand a word of it. Right from the start of this interrogation, I was not willing to be amiable, she later said. The men began peppering her with a volley of questions, to which she responded, Why do you want to know this? One of her interrogators snapped, You werent asked for your opinion, and she snapped back, Tell me first why I am here. He snarled, If you dont know, youll find out soon enough.

The Germans refused to believe her claim of being an Egyptologist; to them, she was a spy for the Allies. In reality, she was both. But she kept pushing back against their allegations, insisting that they go through the address book they had just confiscated and call her contacts in Paris to prove that, despite her youth, she was indeed one of the Louvres curators and blameless of the charges they were lodging against her.

As the questioning proceeded, Desrochess temper grew shorter and shorter. Shed already had plenty of experience dealing with arrogant men like these. In the macho, rough-and-tumble world of French archaeology, women were an extreme rarity, and shed been shunned and harassed since her earliest days in the field.

I had encountered a certain amount of misogyny at the Louvre, she recalled, but nothing like at the French Institute of Oriental ArchaeologyFrances elite Cairo-based research center for the study of ancient Egypt. When she was named its first female fellow in 1938, her male colleagues rose up in revolt, refusing to share the library or even the dining room with me. They said I would collapse and die in the field.

But neither that revolt nor the myriad other acts of discrimination she faced in her career were enough to stop Desroches from establishing herself as one of the worlds foremost experts on ancient Egypt. She was well along that path at the time of her arrest by the Gestapo, and, even at a moment when her life was clearly in danger, the young archaeologist, who stood just five feet tall, could not abide the idea of men refusing to take her seriously.

At one point, she scolded her interrogators for their bad manners: I cant believe how poorly you were raised. Is this any way to receive a woman, with your feet on the table? For a moment, they were speechless. Then they tried to silence me, she remembered, but I kept going. I couldnt stop cursing at them, and they ended up sending me back to my cell. Unbelievably, the next day, they summoned me again, to tell me that for the time being I was free. They kept my address book and said Id hear from them soon.

As the Gestapo had learned, Desroches refused to be intimidated by anyone. A willful real-life female version of Indiana Jones, she told an interviewer many years after the war, You dont get anywhere without a fight, you know. I never looked for the fight. If I became a brawler, it was out of necessity.

When Christiane Desroches was little more than a toddler, her paternal grandfather had hoisted her on his shoulders and taken her to see the Obelisk of Luxor, the pink granite monolith that looms over the vast Place de la Concorde in Paris. At that moment, her lifelong love affair with ancient Egypt began.

In later visits to the obelisk, her grandfather told her a bit about its history. It was more than three thousand years old, he saidcreated during the reign of Rameses II, one of Egypts most powerful pharaohs, to stand guard outside a temple in the royal city of Thebes (now Luxor). In 1833, Egypts viceroy had presented it to the king of France to mark Frances close attachment to Egypt and its fabled ancient historyan association dating back to a military expedition led by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798.

The primary purpose of Napoleons mission had been to annex Egypt to France, establishing his country as the dominant military power in the Mediterranean and in the process undermining the interests of its archrival, Britain. But several dozen members of Napoleons party had embarked on a very different quest. Experts in various fields, they included artists, engineers, linguists, cartographers, historians, mineralogists, botanists, and other scholarsall there to study Egypt and its people, both past and present.

The military campaign was an almost immediate disaster: One month after the French arrived in Egypt, the British fleet, under the command of Admiral Horatio Nelson, defeated the French navy at the Battle of the Nile. The scholarly expedition, however, proved to be a success beyond anyones imagination. Its greatest triumph was to introduce France and the rest of the West to a complex, vibrant civilization that predated both the Romans and Greeks.