Note 49 — LETTER XV.

The inscription referred to is in the rock-cave of Echmin, and was, without doubt, first engraved under Ptolemæus Philadelphus, with double cartouches and the usual royal titles, but without the surname of Soter; he is mentioned on a stele in Vienna which was erected under Philopator. Here, however, he has another cartouche than at Echmin, and moreover, in a remarkable manner, the same as that which Philippus Aridaeus and Alexander II., under whom Ptolemæus Lagus was Viceroy in Egypt, bore before his time. In like manner he is named on a statue of the king in the ruins of Memphis, where the Horus-name of the king may be found, and which may probably have been made during his reign. Finally, the Soters are sometimes only mentioned by their surnames, at the head of the honoured ancestors of later kings, as in the inscription of Rosetta, and in the bilingual Decrees of Philae written while Soter II. is always written p. nuter enti nehem, which would answer to the Koptic , deus servator. In the Demotic inscriptions, too, the first Soters are designated by nehem, and in the singular, by the Greek word p.suter.

Although it is not to be doubted that the Soters, who, according to the Demotic papyrus, had a peculiar cultus with the rest of the Ptolemies, not only in Alexandria and Ptolemais, but also in Thebes, were looked upon as the chiefs of the Ptolemaic dynasty, it is more remarkable that till now no building has been discovered which was erected under Ptolemæus Soter as king, although he continued twenty years in this capacity. To this must be added that the above-mentioned hieroglyphic lists of Ptolemies, without exception, do not begin the series with Soters, but with the Adelphi, as said at Echmin, his cartouches have no royal titles, and that in Karnak, under Euergetes II., Philadelphus is represented as King, and Soter, answering to the same period, not as king. Also in the Demotic king lists of the papyrus, the Alexandrian series passes over the Soters down to Philometor, and lets the Adelphi immediately follow Alexander the Great. The Soters have come before me at the earliest in a papyrus of the seventeenth year of Philopator (210 B.C.), the oldest in the Berlin collection; the Thebaic cultus of the Ptolemies seems to have excluded the Soters altogether. Although, therefore, the beginning of the royal government in the year 305 B.C., as the Canon asserts, is an ascertained fact, and is incontestably confirmed by the hieroglyphic stele in Vienna, which has been cited for it by my friend M. Pinder (Beitr. zur älteren Münzkunde, Band I. p. 201) in his instructive essay “On the era of Philippus on coins,” it seems to authorize another legitimate view, according to which, not Ptolemæus Logi, but Philadelphus, the eldest king’s son (even though not Porphyrogenitus), was the head of the Ptolemies. Thus it may also be explained, that we find under Euergetes I. an astronomical era employed, that of the otherwise unknown Dionysius, which took its beginning from the year 285 B.C. the first of Philadelphus, while the coins of Philadelphus neither count from his own accession, nor from the year 305 B.C., but from the year of the decease of Alexander the Great, or the beginning of the viceroyship of Ptolemaeus, as the beginning point of a new era. (See Pinder, p. 205).