INTRODUCTION. 5 
more helpful where the complicated writing, especially poorly suited for monumental use (p. 3), 
can be read with certainty.!. Thus the gaps and obscurities of the Greek text of the Rosettana 
need comparison with the Egyptian versions, while these useful commentaries themselves would 
be much more obscure without the Greek original. We gain now, by our parallel text from 
Philz, a better understanding of all three versions of the Rosettana, principally of the hiero- 
glyphic part.’ 
One general result of comparing our Phile text with the Rosettana is the relatively close 
_adherence to the style of the official hieroglyphic text of year 9. The Egyptian scribes of the 
New Empire usually showed great lack of accuracy in copying any texts; they varied their 
models intentionally by freely using synonymous words and synonymous orthography. We 
still find a great amount of such liberty in those Ptolemaic decrees, more than modern systems 
of writing would tolerate, but the scholars who could use archaic Egyptian quite fluently had 
evidently become scarcer; therefore, we observe that such masterpieces of style as the Rosetta 
text were followed in a fairly accurate way, especially where they contained strange and . 
remarkable archaisms. Lack of hieroglyphic types, as said (p. 2, note 1), prevents my studying 
the very peculiar style of our decrees from the philological side; this theme invites the attention 
of specialists in Egyptian grammar.® 
Less rich are the results for the demotic text of the old Memphis decree. The demotic 
hand of the Phile text is much prettier and clearer than that of the faithful engraver of the 
Rosettana, for instance, but the sandstone of Philz did not receive and preserve the signs as 
well as the basalt of the Rosetta stone; this writing, poorly suited for monumental use in general, 
as said repeatedly, has thus here in many places become indistinct. Like all kinds of stenog- 
raphy, it needs absolute clearness and a safe context to be readable. I have given the traces in 
such passages mechanically as I could see them on the stone, and only in my translation, not on 
the plates, have I dared to restore boldly after the corresponding lines of the Rosettana. 
The two decrees can be called bilingual after their present condition or trilingual according 
to the original intention of the priests. The omission of the Greek version at Phile is not with 
certainty significant (as though, in the cataract region, the Greek-speaking element had been 
scarce enough to form an excuse for the omission of the Greek part). This tendency to save 
some part of labor by quiet omission appears too often in ancient Egypt. A good example is 
the stela of Damanhur, where the priests apparently thought they had shown their good will 
sufficiently by some wretched extracts from the hieroglyphic text, disregarding completely the 
two other versions. 
1 The engraver of the demotic Rosettana slavishly copied his extremely hastily written model on papyrus as though he had papyrus 
for his material; he did not attempt to change it anywhere to clear monumental forms. We often doubt whether he could read at all. 
Therefore, the demotic Rosettana is an extremely difficult text, on the exact philological explanation of which much remains to be done 
after the pioneer attempts of H. Brugsch, R. Revillout, and J. J. Hess. 
2 The hieroglyphic text of the Rosettana is, strange to say, one of the least treated and least understood Egy ptian texts. The 
pioneers of Egyptology turned away from it after it had furnished, in its most frequent words, the key to more promising texts. Since 
the meritorious but imperfect study of F. Chabas (L’inscription hiéroglyphique de Rosette, 1867) only the compilation of Budge (The 
Decrees of Memphis and Canopus, 1904, 3 volumes) treats rather superficially of the text, which is by no means intelligible in every word 
or sign. 
oT he most interesting side of this style seems to be that we have in those decrees the last traces of the Neo-Egyptian style of the 
New Empire, which, however, had, in Ptolemaic time, become in turn archaic and was therefore mixed more and more with the 
earlier, classical styles. Notwithstanding this, the style of the decrees remained very peculiar and quite distinct from the usual, 
purely religious, inscriptions in hieroglyphic signs. 
