The first complete copy of the Ptolemaic-era Canopus Decree to be found in 150 years has been discovered in Egypt. The last one was discovered at Kom el-Hisn in the western Nile delta in 1881. The recently-discovered sandstone stele was unearthed at the Tell el-Pharaeen site in the Sharqia governorate, 80 miles east of Kom el-Hisn, and is unique among the seven known copies of the 3rd century B.C. decree in that it is inscribed solely in hieroglyphs.The stela measures 127.5 cm in height, 83 cm in width, and about 48 cm in thickness [,41x 29x 17], with a rounded top. A winged sun disk crowns the top, flanked by two royal cobras wearing the White and Red Crowns, with the inscription Di-Ankh (given life) between them. The central section contains 30 lines of hieroglyphic text carved in sunk relief.Promulgated in 238 B.C., the Canopus Decree was a trilingual inscription carved on stone or bronze in Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic script and Koine Greek. It is the second in the series of multi-lingual Ptolemaic decrees that would become known as the Rosetta Stone Series, after the famous inscription that provided the key to the decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs by Jean-Franois Champollion in 1822. (The Rosetta Stone is actually the most recent of the series, the Memphis Decree, dating to 196 B.C. The oldest is the Alexandria Decree from 243 B.C.)The decree lavishes Ptolemy and his wife Berenice with praise for this great benefices to the temples of Egypt, their honoring of the gods and the care they take of the sacred animals at their own expense. Ptolemy also gets credit for having gone to war against the Persian Seleucid Empire to reclaim the images of the gods looted from Egyptian temples by Cambyses hundreds of years earlier in 525 B.C.The inscription lauds Ptolemy for protecting Egypt from insurrections, fighting in distant lands against would-be conquerors, giving personal support and care to the people of Egypt after a failed annual flooding of the Nile caused drought and famine, remitting taxes and importing wheat from other Ptolemaic territories, then paying exorbitant inflated prices to buy even more grain from foreign traders. Spurred by high levels of taxation to fund the Persian war, the insurrection of native Egyptians against Ptolemy was the first of what would be many such uprisings against Ptolemaic dynasty pharaohs. The focus on Ptolemys famine relief is propaganda casting him as benevolent rather than exploitative to the discontented Egyptian populace, just as the emphasis on return of the deities casts the Persian war in a pious light.And thats not all. They deified their daughter Princess Berenice, who died suddenly while the priests and royals were convened at Canopus. They added a new rank of five priests, established a new festival in honor of the cult and added a new day to the calendar every four years dedicated to the worship of the King and Queen. This created the most accurate solar calendar known to the ancient world, with 365 and a quarter days a year. Ptolemy III and the traditional Egyptian priesthood came out of this meeting with a much stronger alliance, and they wanted it known. The decree states that its terms be incised in stone or bronze in hieroglyphs and Greek to be posted in every temple in Egypt. Thats why its so striking that this one example was inscribed only in one language.