Note 37 — CLEOPATRA’S NEEDLE. (continued 2)

In the centre of the southern Egyptian gallery of the British Museum, “is placed the celebrated Rosetta stone; it is a tablet of black basalt, having three inscriptions, two of them in the Egyptian language, but in two different characters (hieroglyphic and enchorial); the third in Greek. The inscriptions are to the same purport in each, being a decree of the priesthood at Memphis in honour of Ptolemy Epiphanes, about the year b.c. 196. This stone has furnished the key to the interpretation of the Egyptian characters.” There is likewise, in the same gallery, “a cast of a similar trilingual tablet found at San, being a decree of the priests at Canopus in honour of Ptolemy Euergetes I. and Berenice, b.c. 238.” (Birch.) San, it will be remembered, is “the field of Zoan of the Bible.”