106 Rev. Epwarp Hincks on the Defacement of Egyptian Monuments. 
sessed, however, the title of king, and appears along with his sister on most of 
her monuments, as on the great obelisk at Karnac, and on the propylon at El- 
Assassif. It seems that the king was not satisfied with this state of things; and 
that on his attaining to the sole sovereignty he defaced the name of his sister in a 
variety of places. He sometimes left a blank space, as on the statue of Onevto 
in the British Museum, and on another statue in the Athanasi collection, the 
inscriptions on which have been copied by Mr. Bonomi and Mr. Sharpe. 
In other instances, as on the propylon at El Assassif, he substituted either his 
own name, or that of his father, for that of his sister, adding a beard to the face 
of the latter. And as he himself was represented on this monument, in its origi- 
nal state, accompanying his sister, he defaced also his own original cartouche, 
inserting in it the name of his wife ; so that he and his wife appeared to occupy 
the two places originally designed for his sister and himself. The changes, however, 
which would be necessary in order to reduce this monument from one of Queen 
Amuneth and her brother Thothmos III., to one of the latter exclusively, were 
more than could be carried into effect; and the ill-success of this attempt pro- 
bably saved the great obelisk at Karnac from a similar defacement. The femi- 
nine pronoun remained unaltered, and its use in reference to a bearded figure 
completely mystified M. Champollion, leading him to adopt a theory respecting 
these royal cartouches, which, it appears from Mr. Birch’s late publication, “ The 
Gallery of Antiquities,” has not yet been abandoned as involving a tissue of 
absurdities. M. Champollion has confounded two queens regnant, Amenset, who 
appears to have been grandmother to Thothmos II., and Amuneth, who was cer- 
tainly posterior to him. Of these two he makes one queen, whom he supposes 
to be sister of this king. He gives her two imaginary husbands ; one of the name 
of Thothmos, and another, to whom he assigns as a name the phonetic name of 
this queen herself, which he reads Amenenthe, and whom he supposes to have 
governed in her name as a regent. Lastly, he supposes Thothmos III. to have 
been the son of this queen by her first husband Thothmos. This theory has been 
adopted, with slight modifications, by all subsequent writers, including Sir J. G. 
Wilkinson, till I pointed out to the Royal Irish Academy in 1838, that the 
builder of the Karnac obelisks was not the mother but the sister of Thothmos III. ; 
and that the long monumental reign of the latter king is to be attributed to the 
fact of his dating his years from the death of his father, while Manetho only 
