The Ankh-Hapy stele is an Egyptian-Aramaic

stele A stele ( ),Anglicized plural steles ( ); Greek plural stelai ( ), from Greek , ''stēlē''. The Greek plural is written , ''stēlai'', but this is only rarely encountered in English. or occasionally stela (plural ''stelas'' or ''stelæ''), whe ...

dated to 525–404 BCE. It was first published in a letter from François Lenormant to

Ernest Renan Joseph Ernest Renan (; 27 February 18232 October 1892) was a French Orientalist and Semitic scholar, expert of Semitic languages and civilizations, historian of religion, philologist, philosopher, biblical scholar, and critic. He wrote influe ...

in the '' Journal asiatique''; Lenormant had noticed the stele in the Vatican collections and had brought a cast from Rome in 1860. Lenormant considered the stele to be reminiscent of the

Carpentras Stele The Carpentras Stele is a stele found at Carpentras in southern France in 1704 that contains the first published inscription written in the Phoenician alphabet, and the first ever identified (a century later) as Aramaic. It remains in Carpentras, a ...

. The inscription was considered to be Aramaic, on the basis that it used the same style of writing and dialect as the Carpentras stele, the Turin papyri, the Blacas papyri and an Aramaic papyrus in the Louvre.Lettre à M. Ernest Renan sur une stèle araméo-égyptienne encore inédite
Journal Asiatique, 1867, volume X, page 512: "Il est pourtant facile de la recon naître du premier coup d'œilpour araméenne, tracée avec les mêmes caractères et dans le même dialecte que l'ins cription de lastèle de Carpentras et les papyrus araméo égyptiens du musée de Turin, de la collection Blacas (actuellement au musée Britannique) et du musée du Louvre." Lenormant referenced:
* Turin: Raoul Rochette, Journal asiatique, 1° série, t. V, p. 20; Beer, Inscriptiones et papyri veteres semitici, pl. I; Gesenius, Monumenta phœnicia, pl. XXX * Blacas: (1) Lanci, La sacra Scrittura illustrata con monumenti fenico-assyri ed egiziani. Rome, 1827; (2) Beer, Inscriptiones et papyri veteres semitici, pl. II et III; (3) Gesenius, Monumenta phœnicia, pl. XXXI et XXXII *Louvre: Bargès, Papyrus égypto-araméen appartenant au Musée égyptien du Louvre. Paris, 1862 , in-4° The Aramaic inscription is known as KAI 272, CIS II 142 and TAD C20.6.

References

{{reflist Aramaic inscriptions KAI inscriptions 1st-millennium BC steles 5th-century BC inscriptions 1860 archaeological discoveries