while Soter II. is always written
p. nuter enti nehem, which would answer to the Koptic
, deus servator. In the Demotic inscriptions, too, the first Soters are designated by nehem, and in the singular, by the Greek word p.suter.
Although it is not to be doubted that the Soters, who, according to the Demotic papyrus, had a peculiar cultus with the rest of the Ptolemies, not only in Alexandria and Ptolemais, but also in Thebes, were looked upon as the chiefs of the Ptolemaic dynasty, it is more remarkable that till now no building has been discovered which was erected under Ptolemæus Soter as king, although he continued twenty years in this capacity. To this must be added that the above-mentioned hieroglyphic lists of Ptolemies, without exception, do not begin the series with Soters, but with the Adelphi, as said at Echmin, his cartouches have no royal titles, and that in Karnak, under Euergetes II., Philadelphus is represented as King, and Soter, answering to the same period, not as king. Also in the Demotic king lists of the papyrus, the Alexandrian series passes over the Soters down to Philometor, and lets the Adelphi immediately follow Alexander the Great. The Soters have come before me at the earliest in a papyrus of the seventeenth year of Philopator (210 B.C.), the oldest in the Berlin collection; the Thebaic cultus of the Ptolemies seems to have excluded the Soters altogether. Although, therefore, the beginning of the royal government in the year 305 B.C., as the Canon asserts, is an ascertained fact, and is incontestably confirmed by the hieroglyphic stele in Vienna, which has been cited for it by my friend M. Pinder (Beitr. zur älteren Münzkunde, Band I. p. 201) in his instructive essay “On the era of Philippus on coins,” it seems to authorize another legitimate view, according to which, not Ptolemæus Logi, but Philadelphus, the eldest king’s son (even though not Porphyrogenitus), was the head of the Ptolemies. Thus it may also be explained, that we find under Euergetes I. an astronomical era employed, that of the otherwise unknown Dionysius, which took its beginning from the year 285 B.C. the first of Philadelphus, while the coins of Philadelphus neither count from his own accession, nor from the year 305 B.C., but from the year of the decease of Alexander the Great, or the beginning of the viceroyship of Ptolemaeus, as the beginning point of a new era. (See Pinder, p. 205).
[50] [Manetho in Bunsen, Egypt’s Place, vol i. p. 620. Nitocris is the last of this dynasty. K. R. H. M.]
[51] Denkmäler aus Ægypten und Æthiopien, Abth. II. Blatt. 123-133.
[52] [Bunsen’s Egypt’s Place, vol. i. p, 45. K. R. H. M.]
[53] Denkmäler, Abth. II. Bl. 134.