CANOPUS, DECREE OF

also called Table of Tanis ancient bilingual, trigraphic Egyptian decree that provided a key for deciphering hieroglyphic and the simpler demotic scripts. The decree, written in Greek, demotic, and hieroglyphs, was promulgated March 7, 238 BC, by an assemblage of priests in honour of Ptolemy Euergetes and his consort Berenice. The two copies of the decree discovered at Tanis (modern San al-Hajar al-Qibliyah) in 1866 are considered by many scholars to be second only to the Rosetta Stone in their value for deciphering ancient Egyptian.