to punish him,
but wisely summoned the AEtolian ambassadors and the chiefs of the
mercenaries to his trial, and, as they made no objection, he then had
him poisoned in prison.

No sooner was this rebellion crushed than the council took into
consideration the propriety of declaring the king's minority at an
end, as the best means of re-establishing the royal authority; and they
thereupon determined shortly to celebrate his Anacleteria, or the grand
ceremony of exhibiting him to the people as their monarch, though he
wanted some years of the legal age; and accordingly, in the ninth year
of his reign, the young king was crowned with great pomp at Memphis, the
ancient capital of the kingdom.

On this occasion he came to Memphis by barge, in grand state, where
he was met by the priests of Upper and Lower Egypt, and crowned in the
temple of Phtah with the double crown, called Pschent, the crown of the
two provinces. After the ceremony, the priests made the Decree in honour
of the king, which is carved on the stone known by the name of the
Rosetta Stone, in the British Museum. Ptolemy is there styled King of
Upper and Lower Egypt, son of the gods Philopatores, approved by Phtah,
to whom Ra has given victory, a living image of Amon, son of Ra, Ptolemy
immortal, beloved by Phtah, god Epiphanes most gracious. In the date
of the decree we are told the names of the priests of Alexander, of the
gods Soteres, of the gods Adelphi, of the gods Euergetae, of the gods
Philopatores, of the god Epiphanes himself, of Berenice Euergetis, of
Arsinoe Philadelphus, and of Arsinoe Philopator. The preamble mentions
with gratitude the services of the king, or rather of his wise minister,
Aristomenes; and the enactment orders that the statue of the king
shall be worshipped in every temple of Egypt, and be carried out in the
processions with those of the gods of the country; and lastly, that
the decree is to be carved at the foot of every statue of the king, in
sacred, in common, and in Greek writing. It is to this stone, with its
three kinds of letters, and to the skill and industry of Dr. Thomas
Young, and of the French scholar, Champollion, that we now owe our
knowledge of hieroglyphics. The Greeks of Alexandria, and after them the
Romans, who might have learned how to read this kind of writing if they
had wished, seem never to have taken the trouble: it fell into disuse on
the rise of Christianity in Egypt; and it was left for an Englishman
t