Christiane Noblecourt | Egyptologist, 97

Christiane Desroches Noblecourt, 97, a pioneering French Egyptologist who prodded Gen. Gamal Abdel Nasser to help salvage Nubia's vaunted antiquities, died Thursday at a hospital in Epernay, east of Paris, where she had been taken after a recent stroke, said Anne Françoise, treasurer of a retirement home in the nearby town of Sezanne where Ms. Desroches Noblecourt lived the last few years.

Born Nov. 17, 1913, in Paris, she developed a passion for Egypt after reading about the discovery of King Tut's tomb in the early 1920s. She later studied at the Louvre and the Sorbonne.

After an initial trip to Egypt in the late 1930s, she became the first woman to be put on a stipend with the Cairo-based French Institute of Oriental Archaeology - cracking a male-dominated world of Egyptology.

After Egyptian officials began planning the Aswan High Dam on the Nile in 1954, Ms. Desroches Noblecourt met Nasser to air concerns that 32 ancient temples and chapels in southern Nubia were facing submersion.

In an interview with Le Monde newspaper in 2007, she recalled how she told him to "let me handle it, I'll go talk to UNESCO on your behalf," and he "trusted me and let me do it."

Paris-based UNESCO - the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization - then helped mobilize nearly 50 countries for a vast project in the 1960s to dismantle, move, and reconstruct the antiquities - including massive statues of Pharaoh Ramses II at Abu Simbel, which were broken down into 1,000 pieces and rebuilt over four years. - AP