Elizabeth Thomas (Egyptologist)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Elizabeth Thomas (born March 29, 1907 in Memphis , Tennessee , † November 28, 1986 in Jackson , Mississippi ) was an American Egyptologist .

Origin and education

Elizabeth Thomas was born in Memphis, Tennessee, USA, in 1907 and grew up in Grenada , Mississippi. She spent part of her time near Cruger , where members of her family owned the Egypt Plantation. She was the youngest child of Ruth Archer and James Talbert Thomas and had two older brothers. In the fall of 1924 she attended Grenada College and the following fall transferred to Hollins College near Roanoke, Virginia , where she stayed for only a year. After an interruption of almost 10 years, she returned to Grenada College in the fall of 1935 and then moved to the University of Mississippi at Oxford , where she completed her bachelor's degree in May 1937 .

Thomas first toured Egypt in 1935. In February and early March 1938 she was in Luxor , where she spent much of her time in West Thebes, visiting the tombs in the Valley of the Kings and Queens . She also visited the Chicago House , the headquarters of the Epigraphic Survey of the University of Chicago , in Luxor. There she met the Egyptologist Charles F. Nims and his wife Myrtle Nims, among others .

Education

After her experiences in Egypt, Elizabeth Thomas decided to study Egyptology at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago . She arrived in Chicago in the late summer of 1938, where she met Helene J. Kantor , with whom she was taking Hebrew and history lessons. She also made further acquaintances with George R. Hughes and Richard Anthony Parker , with whom she had a long-standing friendship, as well as the Egyptologists Ricardo Caminos and Klaus Baer. In addition to studying the ancient Egyptian language and culture, she took further courses in linguistics , English, Indian philosophy and religious studies . Between 1942 and 1946 she worked with colleagues from the Oriental Institute on behalf of the US Army Signal Corps and helped decrypt German cryptographic codes during the war . At that time she had extensive language skills in Latin , Ancient Greek , Hebrew and a few other European languages ​​(including German ) and was therefore particularly valuable to the Corps.

After the war Thomas returned to her studies and worked on her dissertation . During the 1947/48 excavation season she spent some time at Chicago House and finished her studies in the spring of 1948 with a dissertation on the " Cosmology of Pyramid Texts ". After completing her studies, she first moved to New York and a little later to Princeton , New Jersey , where she occasionally visited the Firestone Library at Princeton University .

activities

During the 1949/50 excavation season, Elizabeth Thomas returned to Egypt and this time worked with Alexandre Piankoff and Natacha Rambova on an expedition of the Bollingen Foundation . The aim of the expedition was to find inscriptions from the tomb of Ramses VI. in the Valley of the Kings and texts of some royal pyramids in Saqqara . When she arrived in Egypt in October 1949, she went to Saqqara to do some preliminary examinations. Since only the Unas pyramid was open at that time , the focus of the project was now solely on the grave of Ramses VI. Although she was still going to Luxor with the expedition in October, she left the project and returned to Princeton.

In 1951 she built her house in Princeton on Edgerstoune Road . In 1953 she planned an extended trip to Egypt, during which she took her car and her cocker spaniel "Uni" (named after Unas ) with her. In Luxor she again used the Chicago House as a starting point for her further studies and began to be interested in the royal cemeteries in Thebes. She noticed that most of the graves in the Valley of the Queens were still partially filled with rubble and none of them had been fully published. There were also some graves in the Valley of the Kings that have not yet been fully explored.

After she wrote some articles for the Journal of Egyptian Archeology (JEA) in her homeland , Thomas returned to Egypt again in 1959. In the Valley of the Queens, she recorded the decorations of some unknown graves and made precise plans and elevations of all accessible graves in the royal valleys and individual side wadis . She even rented a camel and hauled a ladder out of Chicago House to access the rock wall tombs in the Southwest Wadis. Although she started her own excavation season in 1959/60, she worked under the auspices of the American Research Center in Egypt and in 1961 provided plans of KV55 for the JEA. She later gave a large number of her grave plans to Rosalind Moss of the Griffith Institute , who revised the Theban volumes of the Topographical Bibliography .

Publications

In 1960 she returned from Egypt and began to analyze her notes and plans. After initially wanting to limit herself to the Valley of the Queens and the unlabeled graves in the Valley of the Kings, she had now studied all the royal cemeteries. To continue her studies, she attended the Griffith Institute at the University of Oxford . There she researched Howard Carter's notepads and made frequent visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to study Herbert Winlock's archival material on the Theban necropolis. Subsequently, she brought out her main work The Royal Necropoleis of Thebes in 1966 , which presented the history of the royal cemeteries from their creation ( 11th to 20th dynasty ) to modern times. It was the first published information of many queen tombs and the first comprehensive treatise on the Valley of the Kings as a whole and became a highly regarded standard work.

Others

After the 1959/60 season she did not return to Egypt, but continued to study the Theban necropolis and maintained extensive correspondence and a lively exchange of information with colleagues in her field. She was not only interested in Ancient Egypt and Thebes, but also found out about current events in Egypt and the Middle East . In addition, she dealt with Eastern religions for her entire life, commuting between Princeton and New York City to Columbia University every week in the early 1950s , where Zen master Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki gave lectures.

Elizabeth Thomas died in Jackson, Mississippi on November 28, 1986 at the age of 79. After her death, she bequeathed her personal library and scholarly publications to the Institute of Egyptian Art and Archeology at the University of Memphis .

Fonts

  • Air Channels in the Great Pyramid. In: Journal of Egyptian Archeology. 39, 1953, ISSN  0307-5133 , p. 113, online (PDF; 292 kB) .
  • On Travel by Car in Egypt. In: Newsletter of the American Research Center in Egypt. September 13, 1954, ISSN  0402-0731 , pp. 5-6.
  • Solar Barks Prow to Prow. In: Journal of Egyptian Archeology. 42, 1956, pp. 65-79 online (PDF; 2.37 MB) .
  • Another note on rock-cut boats. In: Journal of Egyptian Archeology. 42, 1956, pp. 117-118.
  • Terrestrial Marsh and Solar Mat. In: Journal of Egyptian Archeology. 45, 1959, pp. 38-51.
  • Ramesses III: notes and queries. In: Journal of Egyptian Archeology. 45, 1959, pp. 101-102.
  • Report from Miss Elizabeth Thomas. In: Newsletter of the American Research Center in Egypt. 41, March 1961, pp. 9-17.
  • The Plan of Tomb 55 in the Valley of the Kings. In: Journal of Egyptian Archeology. 47, 1961, p. 24.
  • The Tomb of a Nineteenth Dynasty Queen. In: Newsletter of the American Research Center in Egypt. 45, April 1962, pp. 6-8.
  • pæ ãr õní õnw / n õnw ãní A Designation of the Valley of the Kings. In: Journal of Egyptian Archeology. 49, 1963, pp. 57-63.
  • The Four Niches and Amuletic Figures in Theban Royal Tombs. In: Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt. 3, 1964, ISSN  0065-9991 , pp. 71-78.
  • The Royal Necropolis of Thebes. Princeton 1966.
  • Was Queen Mutnedjemet the owner of Tomb 33 in the Valley of the Queens? In: Journal of Egyptian Archeology. 53, 1967, pp. 161-163.
  • Cairo Ostracon J. 72460. In: Studies in Honor of Georges R. Hughes. January 12, 1977 (= Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization. 39, ISSN  0081-7554 ). The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, Chicago IL 1976, pp. 209-216.
  • The "Well" in Kings' Tombs of Bibân el-Molûk. In: Journal of Egyptian Archeology. 64, 1978, pp. 80-83.
  • Papio Hamadryas and the Rising Sun. In: Bulletin of the Egyptological Seminar. 1, 1979, ISSN  0270-210X , pp. 91-94.
  • The þæy of Queen Inhapy. In: Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt. 16, 1979, pp. 85-92.
  • The Tomb of Queen Ahmose (?) Merytamen, Theban Tomb 320. In: Serapis. 6, 1980, ZDB ID 8377-x , pp. 171-182.

literature

  • Charles C. Van Siclen in: Varia Aegyptiaca. 3, 1987, ZDB -ID 629773-0 , p. 3.
  • Rita E. Freed in: Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt. 24, 1987, pp. 1-2.
  • Catharine H. Roehrig in: Newsletter of the American Research Center in Egypt. 136/137, 1987, pp. 33-34.
  • Morris L. Bierbrier: Who was who in Egyptology . 4th revised edition. Egypt Exploration Society. London 2012, ISBN 978-0-85698-207-1 , p. 539.

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ The results of this study were published in: Alexandre Piankoff: The Tomb of Ramesses VI (= Egyptian Religious Textes and Representations. Vol. 1 = Bollingen Series. Vol. 40, ZDB -ID 844375-0 ). Edited by Natacha Rambova. Pantheon Books Inc., New York NY 1954.
  2. ↑ She published her experiences on the road trip in: On Travel by Car in Egypt. 1954, pp. 5-6.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.brown.edu/Research/Breaking_Ground/bios/Thomas_Elizabeth.pdf , p. 1
  2. ↑ a b http://www.brown.edu/Research/Breaking_Ground/bios/Thomas_Elizabeth.pdf , p. 2
  3. ↑ http://www.brown.edu/Research/Breaking_Ground/bios/Thomas_Elizabeth.pdf , p. 3.
  4. ↑ http://www.brown.edu/Research/Breaking_Ground/bios/Thomas_Elizabeth.pdf , p. 4.
  5. ↑ The Plan of Tomb 55 in the Valley of the Kings. 1961, p. 24.
  6. Jump up ↑ Bertha Porter, Rosalind LB Moss, Ethel W. Berney: Topographical Bibliography of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic Texts, Reliefs, and Paintings. Department 1: The Theban Necropolis. Part 2: Royal Tombs and Smaller Cemeteries. 2nd edition, revised and augmented. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1964, pp. Xxv.
  7. ↑ a b http://www.brown.edu/Research/Breaking_Ground/bios/Thomas_Elizabeth.pdf , pp. 5-6.
personal data
SURNAME Thomas, Elizabeth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American Egyptologist
DATE OF BIRTH March 29, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Memphis , Tennessee
DATE OF DEATH November 28, 1986
Place of death Jackson , Mississippi