Ola El Aguizy

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Ola El Aguizy (Arabic: علا العجيزي) is an Egyptian Egyptologist and Emeritus Professor at Cairo University. Born on August 17, 1948, in Cairo, she is an expert in the Demotic language and has published widely on ancient Egyptian writing.

Career highlights
- El Aguizy earned a Master of Arts in Archaeology (1978) and a PhD (1985) from Cairo University.
- She began working at Cairo University in 1970, first as an assistant and later as a lecturer.
- She served as head of the Department of Egyptian Antiquities in 2002, then as Dean of the Faculty of Archaeology in 2003.
- In 2006 she became Professor of Egyptian Languages, a position she held until 2008, when she became Emeritus Professor.
- She is a member of the Permanent Scientific Committee for Archaeology and the International Association of Egyptologists.
- El Aguizy has published extensively on Demotic, including paleographic studies based on papyri from the Egyptian Museum.

Excavations at Saqqara
- Since 2005, she has led Cairo University’s excavations at Saqqara.
- In 2007, her team rediscovered the grave of army commander Ptahmes, a tomb first found in 1859 by Auguste Mariette and partly photographed by Théodule Devéria. The exact location had been lost.
- Some 19th-dynasty tombs were reused as Late Period family tombs, and beneath the tomb of Hwy-nfr was the burial of the mother of a priest of Menkaure.
- In 2014, she uncovered the tomb of Paser, head of the military archives.
- In 2017, she uncovered Iwrhya (Urkhya), a general under Ramses II.
- In 2021, her team found Ptah-M-Wia, head of the treasury under Ramesses II.
- In 2022, El Aguizy and her team discovered a sarcophagus in that tomb after winching down an 8-meter shaft.

Awards and recognition
- In 2015, colleagues published a Festschrift in her honor: Mélanges offerts à Ola el-Aguizy.
- In 2021, Cairo University awarded her a commendation along with other archaeologists such as Ahmed Abdel-Zaher, Mamdouh Eldamaty, and Fayza Haikal.

Selected publications
- The discovery of the tomb of the Great Army General Iwrhya: A quasi 3D Electrical Resistivity Tomography (ERT), Saqqara, Giza, Egypt. Contributions to Geophysics and Geodesy, 2020.
- Changes in Ancient Egyptian Language. Égypte/Monde arabe, 1996 (with Fayza Haikal).
- Some demotic Ostraca in the Cairo Museum. Egitto e Vicino Oriente, 1994.
- A Ptolemaic judicial document from Hwt-nsw. Bulletin of the French Institute of Oriental Archeology, 1988.
- Dwarfs and Pygmies in Ancient Egypt. Annals of the Antiquities Service of Egypt, 1987.
- Her work also appears in major reference works such as The Oxford Handbook of Egyptology.