There are twenty-eight horizontal lines of inscription, and above them is a scene of two boats of Khonsu borne on the shoulders of priests, with the king offering incense before them.
When first translated, the tale was supposed to be a record of fact, but now it is generally considered a folk-tale, redounding to the credit and glory of Khonsu, and therefore made use of by the priests of that god. The king mentioned in it cannot be identified with any of the historical monarchs of Egypt, although his personal name, Rameses, is sufficiently common among the rulers of the xxth dynasty.
Published: Lepsius, Denkmäler, iii, 68.
Translated: Breasted, Ancient Records, ii, 810-815.
The inscription is sculptured on a round-topped stela of red granite, fourteen feet high, set up in the little temple which lies between the paws of the Great Sphinx.
The temple was excavated by Captain Caviglia in 1817. It forms the end of a processional way which leads downwards by paved causeways and flights of steps from the edge of the desert into the sanctuary (see Vyse, Pyramids of Oizeh, iii, 107). The tiny shrine is only ten feet long by five wide, and at its farthest end, with its back to the breast of the Sphinx, stands this stela.
The inscription, which is in horizontal lines, is surmounted by a scene, duplicated to right and left, of the king making a libation of water and burning incense before the figure of a Sphinx couchant upon a pylon or altar. The lower half of the stela is so mutilated that the inscription is either destroyed or illegible.
The inscription purports to be of the time of Thothmes IV, a king of the xviiith dynasty, about 1400 B.C.; erected by that monarch as a votive offering. But from the evidence of the language in which the inscription is couched it is obviously much later; Erman dates it to a period between the xxiiird and xxvith dynasties. It may, however, be a restoration of an earlier record, though of the early inscription nothing remains.