Karnak King List

Also known as the Karnak king list, it include several kings of the First and Second Intermediate Periods, omitted by the king lists of Abydos and Saqqara. Originally located in the southwest corner of the Akh-Menu Hall of the Temple of Amun-Re at Karnak.

Created during the reign of Thutmose III, it listed sixty-one kings, only the names of thirty-nine kings are still legible, and one is not written in a cartouche. Interestingly, the names include a large number of Second Intermediate Period kings not found in the other monumental king lists.

The king list was first described by James Burton in 1825, while exploring and excavating the ruins around Thebes in the early 1820s. Most likely the walls were uncovered while he was excavating the ruins, as the Napoleonic expedition did not mention or copy the scene.

During the mid-1840s, the Lepsius expedition was traveling all over Egypt, competing to purchase interesting Egyptian relics. Under the pretense of rescuing it from certain German acquisition, French archaeologist Émile Prisse d’Avennes had the king list dismantled in secret in order to secure it for France, and had it sent home to Paris in 27 boxes. The transport caused some lesser damage to a few of the stone blocks, but the painted bas-reliefs were in a good state when inspected upon arrival. Incredibly, the boxes were then left where they stood, some barely closed, in the courtyard outside the library, where they remained throughout the fall and winter. After several months of rain, wind, snow and sun, the painted reliefs were now completely denuded of paint. Quelle surprise!

Severely damaged, the blocks with the king list can be seen in the Louvre museum in Paris (Chapelle des ancêtres, Cat. no. E 13481 bis). The original site is in the Akh-menu (Heret-ib) festival hall, room SF-5 at Karnak.

The purpose of the list was to showered or celebrated "ancestors," and was not meant to be a chronological list. The seemingly arbitrary positions the pharaohs are placed in does not reflect the order of succession, and is written in the tradition of Upper Egypt, concentrating on kings of the South.

Content of the king list

Due to the poor state of the list, many of the names has been lost since its discovery. The early travellers who copied the inscriptions did so with varying accuracy.

Cartouches 38 and 57 (33, 59) record s-wꜢḏ-n-rꜤ, while 45 and 56 (42, 60) record s-nfr-[...]-rꜤ. Only one king with each of those names are known and identified. The recorded names were in all likelyhood mistakes by the scribes, as the wꜢḏ, nfr, and Ꜥnḫ signs look alike in hieratic.

The numbering system used in publications hail from the Editio princeps Auswahl, numbering the kings from the center to the edges, top to bottom. However, the kings are facing the edges, indicating that the correct way to read the scenes is from the edges toward the center, which Lepsius corrected in 1853. However the numbering from Auswahl prevail, and is included in a parenthesis.

Names in the king list