#King of kings torrent rosetta stone series#

It ends by saying that it is to be made known that all the men of Egypt should magnify and honour Ptolemy V, and that the text should be set up in hard stone in the three scripts which it still bears today. For example, it stipulates how the priests shall maintain the cult of the king ('.the priests shall pay homage three times a day.'), how the king's shrine is to be set up ('.there shall be set upon the shrine the ten gold crowns of the king.'), and days when certain festivals, such as the king's birthday, shall be celebrated. The final part of the text describes the decree's overriding purpose, the establishment of the cult of the king. The inscription begins with praise of Ptolemy, and then includes an account of the siege of the city of Lycopolis (a town in the Delta, not identified with certainty), and the good deeds done by the king for the temples. It is a version of the decree issued at the city of Memphis others include the Canopus decree in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

#King of kings torrent rosetta stone series#

This second aim was done through a series of priestly decrees, of which the Rosetta Stone is by far the best-known example. It appears that it was decided that the best way to emphasise the legitimacy of the 13 year old Ptolemy V in the eyes of the Egyptian elite was to re-emphasise his traditional royal credentials with a coronation ceremony in the city of Memphis, and to affirm his royal cult throughout Egypt. In the years preceding the setting up of the Rosetta Stone, control of certain parts of Egypt had been lost to the family of the Ptolemies, and it had taken the Ptolemaic armies some time to put down opposition in the Delta parts of southern Upper Egypt, particularly Thebes, were not yet back in the control of the government. Egypt had by now become a multi-cultural society, a mixture of Greek and Egyptian, although in many parts of the country the two rarely met. The Ptolemies were Greeks who had been ruling Egypt since the fragmentation of the Empire of Alexander the Great, and while they built temples in the Egyptian style, their lifestyle and language remained exclusively Greek. The background to the setting up of the stela was the confirmation of the control of the Ptolemaic kings over Egypt. The Rosetta stone is dated to March 196 BC, in the 9th year of Ptolemy V.

Because Greek was well known, the stone was the key to deciphering the hieroglyphs. It is dark grey-pinkish granite stone (originally thought to be basalt in composition) with writing on it in two languages, Egyptian and Greek, using three scripts, Hieroglyphic, Demotic Egyptian and Greek. The Rosetta Stone is 3 feet 9 inches long and 2 feet 41/2 inches wide - (114x72x28cm).