Ptolemy V Epiphanes
Ptolemy V inherited Egypt at five, lost Syria before he was ten, and is known to the modern world because of a decree about his coronation. His father died in 204 and the court concealed it for months. The ministers who took over had his mother murdered and were themselves torn apart by a mob in the stadium at Alexandria. The regency changed hands repeatedly while the child was passed between factions. Macedon and the Seleucid empire agreed to divide the Ptolemaic possessions between them. Antiochus III destroyed the Egyptian army at Panium in 200 and took Coele-Syria and Palestine, which Egypt never recovered. Rome intervened diplomatically on the boy king's behalf, an early step in its involvement in eastern affairs, and Antiochus settled by marrying his daughter to him. Upper Egypt had been in revolt since his father's reign. Two Egyptian pharaohs ruled Thebes and the south for twenty years, the only sustained native challenge to Greek rule, and the revolt was put down in 186 with the leaders executed at Thebes. In 196 the priests met at Memphis and issued a decree recording his coronation, his tax remissions and his suppression of the revolt, and ordered copies set up in every temple in hieroglyphs, demotic and Greek. One of those copies was built into a fort at Rosetta, found by French soldiers in 1799, taken by the British, and used by Thomas Young and Jean-Francois Champollion to read Egyptian writing for the first time in fourteen hundred years. He was poisoned at thirty by courtiers who suspected he meant to confiscate their estates to pay for a war.
- Lived: 210 BCE – 180 BCE
- Nationality: Egyptian
- Roles: head_of_state, royalty
