The =first translation of the Greek text= was made by Du Theil and Weston, in 1801-02, and they rightly declared that the stone was set up as the result of a Decree passed at the General Council of Egyptian priests assembled at Memphis to celebrate the first commemoration of the coronation of =Ptolemy V, Epiphanes=, king of all Egypt. The young king had been crowned in the eighth year of his reign, therefore the first commemoration took place in the ninth year, in the spring of the year, B.C. 196. The Decree sets forth that, because the king had given corn and money from his private resources to the temples, and had remitted taxes and released prisoners, and had abolished the press-gang and restored the worship of the gods, etc., the priests decreed that: Additional honours be paid to the king and his ancestors; an image of the king be set up in every temple; a statue and shrine be set up in every temple; a monthly festival be established on the birthday and coronation day of the king; this Decree be engraved upon a hard stone stele in the writing of the priests (hieroglyphic), in the writing of books (demotic), and in the writing of the Greeks (Greek), and set up in every temple of the first, second, and third class, by the side of the image of the king. In 1802 =Åkerblad= succeeded in making out the general meaning of several lines of the demotic text, and in identifying the equivalents of the names Alexander, Alexandria, Ptolemy, etc. In 1819 =Thomas Young= published in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, vol. IV, the results of his studies of the texts, and among them was a list of several alphabetic Egyptian characters to which, in most cases, he had assigned correct values. He was the first to grasp the idea of a =phonetic principle= in the reading of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, and he was the first to apply it to their decipherment. Warburton, De Guignes, Barthélemy and Zoëga all _suspected_ the existence of alphabetic hieroglyphics, and the three last-named scholars believed that the oval, or _cartouche_ 𓍷, contained a royal name; but it was Young who first proved both points and successfully deciphered the name of =Ptolemy= on the Rosetta Stone, and that of =Berenice= on another monument, and it was Bankes who first identified the name of =Cleopatra=. The list of alphabetic characters was much enlarged in 1822 by the eminent scholar =Champollion=, who not only correctly deciphered the names and titles of most of the Roman Emperors, but drew up classified lists of the hieroglyphics, and formulated a system of grammar and general decipherment which is the foundation upon which all subsequent Egyptologists have worked. The discovery of the correct alphabetic values of Egyptian signs was most useful for reading names, but, for translating the language, a competent knowledge of Coptic was required. Now Coptic is only another name for Egyptian. The Egyptian Christians are called “Copts,” and the Holy Scriptures,