The Egyptian Minister of Tourism and Antiquities, Sherif Fathy, has announced the discovery of a new version of the Canopo decree, one of the most important documents for the deciphering of the hieroglyphics, second in importance only to the Rosetta stele. The stele, 127 cm tall and just over 80 cm wide, was made on the archaeological site of Tell El Farain, a Al Husseiniya, in the Sharqiya Governorate in the region of the Nile delta. The site corresponds to the ancient city of IMET. The excavation was organized by the supreme council of antiquities.
The Canopo decree is a text from 238 BC, created at the time of the Tolomei dynasty. It owes its name to a meeting of the priests in the city of Canopo, now submerged in the Bay of Abukir, near Alessandria. The Ptolemy were the last pharaohs of Egypt, a dynasty of Macedonian origin, whose progenitor was Tolomeo, one of the generals of Alexander the Great. It is an exaltation of the dynasty and the royal family, in which the successes of the Pharaoh Ptolemy III (246-222 BC) listed and different measures of an economic, administrative and religious nature are made public, as well as the adoption of a new reformed calendar, still in use at the Coptic Church of Egypt and said “Alexandrian calendar”.
The importance of the Canopo decree in the history of the deciphering of the hieroglyphics is enormous. In fact, the decree was published in a bilingual edition (Egyptian and Greek) but with three different writing systems: in Egyptian hieroglyphic, in Egyptian demotic (a simpler and “popular” system than the hieroglyphic one) and in Greek. As in the case of Rosetta’s stele, Egyptologists, using the Greek text, managed to decipher both the demotic and the hieroglyphic part. The decree is well known to scholars, given the discovery of six copies of the document.
The stele found in Tell El Farain, decorated with the iconography of the Solar Disk and the two Cobras, is in sandstone, 127 cm x 83 cm. However, this has something different than the six registrations already known. In fact, the text is in an unpublished version and much better preserved than those known so far, and also does not present a bilingual version, but only in Egyptian and in hieroglyphic writing. The choice not to include a Greek version probably indicates the intention of contacting an audience still relatively distant from the Greeking process that Egypt Ptolemaic was undergoing at the time.
