Aswan Dam Project
The construction of the new Aswan High Dam led to Noblecourt’s greatest accomplishment: the preservation of ancient Nubian temples from flooding caused by the dam. The first dam, completed in 1902 with a capacity of a billion cubic meters, had been deemed insufficient and raised in 1912, and again in 1934. The dam’s capacity still could not meet the needs of Egypt’s ever-growing population, and in 1954 the government of Gamal Abdel Nasser decided to build a new dam with a capacity of 157 billion cubic meters, 500 kilometers long, which would extend into Sudan. It has been described as a project worthy of the pharaohs.
The monuments of ancient Nubia would have been flooded and lost forever if the project had gone ahead as planned, among them the temples of Abu Simbel. In the words of writer Pierre Loti, who visited the area shortly after the first dam was completed:
“The greater part of the ancient temples of Nubia will be underwater. . .but the cotton fields will be so productive!”
UNESCO immediately asked Noblecourt, who was then curator of Egyptian antiquities at the Louvre, to create an inventory of all the threatened historical sites. It then undertook the colossal task of finding the funding necessary to save them.
Read more about this topic: Christiane Desroches Noblecourt
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