The memorial temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu contains a minor list of pharaohs of the New Kingdom of Egypt. The inscriptions closely resemble the Ramesseum king list, which is a similar scene of Ramesses II, which was used as a template for the scenes here.
The scene shows Ramesses III participating in the ceremonies of the Festival of Min where statues of ancestral kings are carried in an elaborate procession to make offerings to Min. It contains 16 cartouches with the names of nine pharaohs divided into two parts.
The sparse outline of the scene was published by Vivant Denon in 1802,[1] who was part of Napoleon's expedition to Egypt in 1798 to 1801, which published a slightly more detailed scene in 1809.[2] Thirty years later, the complete scene including the cartouches of the kings was published by John Gardner Wilkinson in 1837,[3] followed by Champollion[4] and Lepsius.[5] All the 19th-century editions contain omissions and errors, but in 1940 the Epigraphic Survey published the definitive (and complete) rendering of the scenes.[6]
