ИСТИНА

In 2011, the corpus of the sources on the Third Syrian War increased by an Alexandrian priestly decree of 243 BC which details the lands allegedly reached by Ptolemy III in 246–245. Among them there is Susiana and a land of %(n)gr (Babylonia) in the hieroglyphic or Prs (Persis) in the Demotic versions of the text. These are the designations of the former Achaemenid metropolitan area comprising both Western Iran and Mesopotamia. If so, this claim stands in line with the enumeration of subdued territories in the monumentum Adulitanum and might indicate Ptolemy’s quest for allies against Seleukos II there. The Alexandrian Decree does not mention %Tt/%tt (“Asia”), the hieroglyphic term for the interregional Near Eastern empire as that of the Achaemenids, Argeads or Seleukids, although this was the standard notion for the hostile realm to the north in earlier and later Ptolemaic hieroglyphic texts. A possible explanation is that Ptolemy was claiming to have established sovereignty over this empire in 246, followed by a peace with Seleukos in 241. Accordingly, Ptolemy’s campaign was less represented as a confrontation with “Asia” than as its political integration into his kingdom. Indeed, the same message is implied in the monumentum Adulitanum, which speaks of his authority as far as Bactria, the easternmost part of that interregional empire. The last point is that the Canopus Decree shows rather definitely the causes and the program of seditio domestica (Just. XXVII. 1.9) that forced Ptolemy III to stop his Asiatic campaign: a reference to earlier epochs of Egyptian history (OGIS 56, ll. 13-15; cf. hier. ll. 7-8, dem. ll. 15-16) suggests that a part of the Egyptian elite used the low floods of the Nile and ensuing food shortages to prove the incapability of the Ptolemies as ritual kings and the need to replace them.