2 INTRODUCTION. 
G. Ebers, in Baedeker’s first Guide Book to Upper Egypt (Oberaegypten, 1891) stated, p. 
322, after Brugsch: “Of scientific importance, but written extremely minutely and almost 
illegibly, are the decrees, above, on the left colonnade near the first pylon, discovered [szc/] by 
Lepsius in 1843, written in the twenty-first year of Ptolemy Epiphanes in demotic and hiero- 
glyphic writing, one at the celebration of the suppression of a rebellion and the punishment of 
the malefactors, the other in honor of Cleopatra, the wife of Epiphanes. Unfortunately these 
decrees have been much mutilated by the figures later (under Neos Dionysos) cut over them.” 
In the edition of Baedeker of 1897, p. 354, this description of the “scientifically important”’ 
texts was limited to the first, which is called “a duplicate of the well-known inscription of 
Rosetta (only the Greek text lacking).’’ Later editions withdrew this remark. 
How far those texts remained unknown to science may be concluded from the fact that 
E. A. W. Budge, in his first volume of The Rosetta Stone, p. 20, in 1904, reproduced a small sec- 
tion of the so-called second decree from Lepsius’s plate with the title “portion of a copy of the 
decree on the Rosetta stone cut in hieroglyphic upon a wall of a temple at Phile.” This illus- 
trates well the illegibility of that publication. 
The high importance of those texts became clear to me when, in 1883-84, as a student at 
Leipzig, I took up privately the study of the demotic script of the ancient Egyptians. Con- 
tinuing these studies at Berlin, in 1884-85, I received from the administration of the Berlin 
Royal Museum permission to examine the paper squeezes brought home by the Lepsius expe- 
dition and immediately saw how that almost useless copy in Lepsius’s Denkmaeler could be 
vastly improved by the study of the original. I devoted much time to the decipherment of 
those squeezes and in later years obtained collations of various details on them by Erman, 
Schaefer, and Sethe, and returned twice to Berlin for the purpose of collating them personally. 
Later, I received, through the courtesy of W. Spiegelberg, a set of paper squeezes of my own. 
My results, however, never were sufficiently certain. ‘The edition presented here is based 
principally on my work in the summer of 1910, when I was able to make further impressions and 
to compare with the original stone the results obtained by me up to that time from squeezes. 
Everybody familiar with epigraphic methods knows that even the best paper impression can 
not entirely replace the study of the original; sometimes a sign will look different on every other 
squeeze. Here, of course, the original is unusually difficult. The small, shallow-engraved 
signs become distinctly visible only during the short time of the day when they receive strong 
side-light; running up and down on high ladders during that time, when even the seconds seem 
precious, is the work of Tantalus for the scholar who would like to brood for hours over a single 
difficult sign. Nevertheless, this comparison of the original on stone was a very desirable 
and even indispensable supplement to the previous attempts of decipherment from squeezes. 
What I offer as result is, I hope, almost exhaustive for the hieroglyphic text, more than can 
be said, e. g., of the existing reproductions of the Rosetta stone.’ A few remaining uncertain- 

1 The principal paleographic characteristics of the hieroglyphs and the distances are carefully reproduced, but (e. g.) the clumsy 
and irregular division-lines (both of the first and second text) are not exactly imitated, because this would interfere with the legibility 
of the text. Therefore, I have also inverted the direction of the hieroglyphic text which, in the original, runs from right to left; in 
measuring the distances, etc., the inverted form on the squeezes had to be followed. ‘The commentary has been limited to the most 
condensed notes possible, principally because the lack of hieroglyphic types forbids philological investigations. Likewise the tran- 
scription of Egyptian aims at simplicity, especially in the very complicated question of rendering the demotic orthography. ‘The 
employment of simple z for the widely different Egyptian sound fs, etc., is to be considered in this light. 
