Carnarvon Tablet

The Carnarvon Tablet is an ancient Egyptian inscription in hieratic recording the defeat of the Hyksos by Kamose.

It preserves a copy of an inscription originally from commemorative stelae of Pharaoh Kamose, detailing his campaign against the Hyksos rulers in northern Egypt during the late Second Intermediate Period (c. 1550 BCE).

The Carnarvon Tablet has since become a valuable source for understanding the political climate of Egypt at the end of the Second Intermediate Period and the beginning of the New Kingdom.

[2] It was discovered amongst pottery debris on a ledge close to the entrance of a tomb near the mouth of the Deir el-Bahari valley.

As early as 1916, Sir Alan Gardiner assumed that the First Carnarvon Tablet must be a copy of some commemorative stela of pharaoh Kamose.

Less than 20 years later, his thesis was confirmed when French Egyptologists Lacau and Chévrier were working on the Third Pylon of Karnak and made the important discovery of two stela fragments.

[4]Sir Alan Gardiner provides the following alternative translation, noting the control of Upper Egypt by the Kerma culture of Nubia: I should like to know what serves this strength of mine, when a chieftain in Avaris, and another in Kush, and I sit united with an Asiatic and a Nubian, each in possession of his slice of Egypt, and I cannot pass by him as far as Memphis... No man can settle down, when despoiled by the taxes of the Asiatics.