Elizabeth Thomas (Egyptologist)

American egyptologist

Elizabeth Mary Thomas (March 29, 1907 – November 28, 1986) was an American Egyptologist. She worked in the Theban Necropolis, near Luxor, recording and publishing tomb plans in the Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens.

Thomas made her first visit to Egypt within a year of her graduation with Thomas Cook & Sons, a tourism company, to ensure safety. However, when she found out that the tour didn't always include the sites she wanted to explore or allow enough time to study its monuments in details, she hired transportation and guides as her only companions to venture off and study in the desert. From February to early March 1938, she traveled around Luxor where she spent most of her time to visit and study the tombs in the Valleys of the Kings and Queens. Thomas met Egyptologist Charles F. Nims and his wife Myrtle Nims, while visiting the Chicago House, the Luxor field headquarters of the Epigraphic Survey of the University of Chicago. The tomb was lost and rediscovered in the 1980's. In 2007, Dr. Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s Secretary General for the Supreme Council of Antiquities, announced that the mummy was indeed Hatshepsut,
verified though DNA testing.

Before much was known about KV5, Elizabeth Thomas suspected that the tomb may have belonged to the royal children of Ramses II. Her hunch was mentioned in a report about tomb robberies by government inspectors that occurred centuries after the construction of KV5. Although later generations of tomb robbers left the tomb in ruins, enough remained to prove that Thomas had been correct.