The geographical lists of Thothmes III. served as a model for the Pharaohs who came after him.  They also adorned the walls of their temples with the names of the places they had captured in Palestine, in Northern Syria, and in the Soudan, and when a large space had to be filled the sculptor was not careful to insert in it only the names of such foreign towns as had been actually conquered.  The older lists were drawn upon, and the names which had appeared in them were appropriated by the later king, sometimes in grotesquely misspelt forms.  The climax of such empty claims to conquests which had never been made was reached at Kom Ombo, where Ptolemy Lathyrus, a prince who, instead of gaining fresh territory, lost what he had inherited, is credited with the subjugation of numerous nations and races, many of whom, like the Hittites, had long before vanished from the page of history.  The last of the Pharaohs whose geographical list really represents his successes in Palestine was Shishak, the opponent of Rehoboam and the founder of the twenty-second dynasty.  The catalogue of places engraved on the wall of the shrine he built at Karnak is a genuine and authentic record.

So too are the lists given by the kings who immediately followed Thothmes III., Amenophis III. of the eighteenth dynasty, Seti I. and Ramses II. of the nineteenth, and Ramses III. of the twentieth.  It is true that in some cases the list of one Pharaoh has been slavishly copied by another, but it is also true that these Pharaohs actually overran and subjugated the countries to which the lists belong.  Of this we have independent testimony.

At one time it was the fashion to throw doubt on the alleged conquests of Ramses II. in Western Asia.  This was the natural reaction from the older belief, inherited from the Greek writers of antiquity, that Ramses II. was a universal conqueror who had carried his arms into Europe, and even to the confines of the Caucasus.  With the overthrow of this belief came a disbelief in his having been a conqueror at all.  The disbelief was encouraged by the boastful vanity of his inscriptions, as well as by the absence in them of any details as to his later Syrian wars.

But we now know that such scepticism was over-hasty.  It was like the scepticism which refused to admit that Canaan had been made an Egyptian province by Thothmes III., and which needed the testimony of the Tel el-Amarna tablets before it could be removed.  As a matter of fact, Egyptian authority was re-established throughout Palestine and even on the eastern bank of the Jordan during the reign of Ramses II., and the conquests of the Pharaoh in Northern Syria were real and not imaginary.  Such has been the result of the discoveries of the last three or four years.