A team of archaeologists from the Catholic University of Santo Domingo in partnership with Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities have discovered a 2,200 year-old limestone upright slab (stele) that dates from the Ptolemaic period (350 n 30 AD) on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt at the Taposiris Magna Site n North Coast.
The information was released by Egypt’s Antiquities Minister Mamdouh El Damaty, who said that the importance of the discovery lies in its resemblance to the Rosetta Stone,?which was inscribed in the ninth year of king Ptolemy V’s reign or two years after this newly discovered slab was inscribed.
Minister El-Damaty stated that the slab contains 20 Hieroglyphic lines with royal cartouches of king?Ptolemy V inscribed during the seventh year of his reign. Cartouches of Ptolemy’s wife and sister, Queen Cleopatra?I, his father, King Ptolemy IV and his wife Arsinoe III also appear. El Damaty said that archaeologists are currently working on transliterating the text.
The Demotic inscriptions that lie at the bottom of the stele consist of five lines of a text that seems to be a translation and copy of the previous Hieroglyphic lines. El Damaty added that the stele is 105cm long, 65m wide and 18cm thick.
The piece is also an exact copy of the one found in the temple of Philae in the southern province of Aswan. Kathleen Martinez, the archaeologist leading the Dominican team, said that her group has been working in the area of the Taposiris Magna Site for six years.
NEWS: Hieroglyphic – Demotic stela discovered in Taposiris Magna
http://www.thecairopost.com/news/137176/inside_egypt/rosetta-stone-style-stele-unearthed-in-the-mediterranean-coast