Ptolemy V Epiphanes

A child king in a kingdom under strain

Ptolemy V Epiphanes came to the throne around age five after his father's death, inheriting a kingdom weakened by the ongoing Great Theban Revolt in Upper Egypt, led first by Horwennefer and then Ankhwennefer, as well as territorial losses to the Seleucid and Macedonian kingdoms abroad. Regents and court ministers governed in his name for years before he was formally crowned pharaoh at Memphis in 196 BCE at around twelve or thirteen years old.

The decree that became the Rosetta Stone

To mark that coronation, a synod of Egyptian priests drafted a decree praising Ptolemy's benefactions to the temples and confirming his royal cult, and had it inscribed on stone in three scripts: hieroglyphic, Demotic, and Greek, so that both priestly and administrative audiences could read it. Copies of this Memphis Decree were set up in temples across Egypt, and one of them, rediscovered by French soldiers near the town of Rosetta in 1799, became the Rosetta Stone. Because the same text appeared in Greek, which scholars could already read, alongside the two Egyptian scripts, it gave Jean-François Champollion the key he needed to decipher hieroglyphic writing in 1822, making a routine piece of dynastic propaganda from a boy king's coronation the single most important document in the modern recovery of ancient Egyptian history.