which is in regular Latin types:
| ANNO XVIII CÆSARIS BARBARVS PRÆF ÆGYPTI POSVIT ARCHITECTANTE PONTIO | In the year · 18 · of Cæsar Barbarus · the prefect of Egypt · erected (it). The architect being · Pontius. |
i. e. Barbarus, governor of Egypt, erected this obelisk in the eighteenth year of the reign of the emperor Augustus (12 B. C.). Pontius was the architect.
The Greek letter Psi (Ψ) in the first line of the Latin text seems to have been the initial of the engraver's name, who must have been a Greek, if we can draw this inference from the beautiful Greek and the poor Latin form of the letters in the inscriptions.
The full translation of the obelisk.
As a recapitulation of the translation of the Egyptian inscriptions on our obelisk, which has been given in the preceding pages, we now place the complete translation of each face of the obelisk in a very compact and simple form before our readers. The English translation will be found to correspond to the hieroglyphs, and each word can be easily picked out on the three columns of the original. All the words in Italics are to be found in the Egyptian text, while those in common Roman types are supplied so as to render the inscriptions intelligible to the reader.
