INTRODUCTION. 
In 1910, through the liberality of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, I was enabled 
to visit the doomed island of Phile and to glean the epigraphic material left by the Berlin 
expedition. My first thought was the decipherment of the famous bilingual inscriptions 
engraved on the walls of the large court between the first and the second pylons. These texts 
had attracted the attention of the very first Egyptologists and were soon recognized as con- 
taining the greatest epigraphic treasure of the island, but their state of mutilation had caused 
them to remain a dead treasure for almost a century. 
Champollion (1828) mentions them in his Notices Descriptives I, p. 178, describing briefly 
some sculptures of Ptolemy Neos Dionysos (Champollion thought Philometor). He con- 
tinues: ‘The inscriptions are illegible because they are drawn over a hieroglyphic and demotic 
inscription from the reign of Epiphanes.”’ It is thus evident that the admirable man who, 
with almost superhuman energy, gathered such an immense mass of material from the monu- 
ments, recognized clearly the bilingual character of those inscriptions, but he had no time for 
the study of such difficult texts. 
In 1843 R. Lepsius noticed those inscriptions which (he thought) “had not been noticed 
by the French-Tuscan expedition’’ and observed their bilingual character. He announced 
this as a very important discovery (see his Briefe aus Aigypten, 108-109, English ed., 120-121). 
In the first decree he saw nothing but a republication of the Rosettana enlarged by the honors 
given to Queen Cleopatra. This involved him in a controversy with de Saulcy, who, on the 
basis of paper impressions taken by Ampere, contested correctly the identity of the decrees of 
Rosetta and Phile. (On this discussion see Zeitschrift der deutschen Morgenl. Gesellschaft, 1847, 
264, foll., Revwe Arch., IV, 240.) 
Next Brugsch passed Phile. In his Rezseberichte, p. 261, he described the decree of 
Epiphanes as “sculptured into the wall with characters so minute that I was hardly able to 
recognize it.”’ In his Sammlung demotischer Urkunden (1850), pl. 3, he published some extracts 
from the first decree, trying to show the correspondence of the hieroglyphic and deinotic 
fragments; also to him the text seemed to be important only for filling gaps of the Rosetta 
inscription. The way in which he gave those extracts was very imperfect.’ It is questionable 
if he copied the second decree. 
In his Denkmaeler aus Aigypten (IV, pl. 33, the demotic text, VI, 30 to 34), Lepsius, who, in 
the use of paper squeezes, possessed a great advantage over his predecessors, had a facsimile 
drawn after the paper impressions of both decrees. These copies, although infinitely better 
than the attempts of Brugsch, left the text so fragmentary that nobody utilized them. 
Finally, Brugsch (Aeg. Zeitschr., 1878, 44), with great sagacity, observed the connection 
of the second decree with the great Egyptian rebellion. His preliminary hints about the con- 
tents suggest that he then planned a more exhaustive treatment of the text, but later abandoned 
this undertaking. 


1The most objectionable features are some wild restorations where there was absolutely nothing on the stone. 
S13405 
