AXUM. 
193 
he does not even positively assert it, simply saying cog 1^ uKoXvQiug 
Ku] slg Tov S](ppov EyeypocTTTO ovrcog. 
The general objections which are to be made to this inscription 
merely relate to it when regarded as a whole, in which light alone it 
has hitherto been considered ; first, that Ptolemy Euergetes actually 
reigned only twenty-five* years, though in the latter part of the in- 
scription on the chair it is said to have been erected by a king in 
the twenty-seventh year of his reign ; secondly, that the first part, or 
the part on the tablet, is written in the third person throughout ; 
and that the second part (on the chair) is written entirely in the first 
person ; thirdly, that the language is also extremely dissimilar in 
the second parts, different words being employed to express the 
same meaning, as, where g-parev^a, and g-^c^revf^ocToc are used on the 
basanite, ^wupceig and ^wupteuv are made use of on the chair ; where 
X^^otg is in one sQvog is invariably in the other, and where Kv^ievo-ag is 
in the first virsToi^ais found in the second. Fourthly, that in the first, 
Ptolemy styles himself son of Ptolemy, descended from Hercules on 
his fathers side, and Dionysus (Bacchus), sons of Jupiter, on his 
mother's, while, in the second, he styles himself son of Mars. Fifthly, 
that Agatharcides, Strabo, Pliny, nay, all writers between the time 
of Ptolemy and the Emperor Justin, make no mention of any such 
conquests of Ptolemy in Abyssinia, or the Red Sea ; yet, it is impos- 
sible to suppose that Agatharcides, who gives an account of that 
very coast, should have been in total ignorance of Adulis ; (a place 
that must have been so well known, had that part of the inscrip- 
tion referred to Ptolemy), and that he who collected his informa- 
tion from the libraries of the Ptolemies only fifty years afterwards, 
* Vide Playfair's Chronology. 
