The Shabaka Stone, sometimes Shabaqo, is a relic incised with an ancient Egyptian religious text, which dates from the Twenty-fifth Dynasty of Egypt. In later years, the stone was likely used as a millstone, which damaged the hieroglyphs. This damage is accompanied by other intentional defacements, leaving the hieroglyphic inscription in poor condition. Provenance Historical origins Originally erected as a lasting monument at the Great Temple of Ptah in Memphis in the late eighth century BCE, the stone was at some point removed (for unknown reasons) to Alexandria. From there, it was transported by a navy vessel from Alexandria to England. It was brought back as ballast along with a capital of an Egyptian column, fragments of a Greco-Roman black basalt capital, two fragments of quartzite lintel of Senwosret III, and a black granite kneeling statue of Ramesses II. In 1805, the stone was donated to the British Museum by George Spencer, 2nd Earl Spencer (1758–1834), who was First Lord of the Admiralty and since 1794 the trustee of the museum. In 1901, the stone was deciphered, translated, and interpreted for the first time by the American Egyptologist, James Henry Breasted. The monument has remained at the museum to the present day. Dating The stone's dedicatory introduction claims that it is a copy of the surviving contents of a worm-ridden, decaying papyrus found by the pharaoh Shabaka in the Great Temple of Ptah. Homer W. Smith dates the original text to the First Dynasty, calling it "the oldest written record of human thought". Breasted, Adolf Erman, Kurt Sethe, and Hermann Junker all dated the stone to the Old Kingdom. The stone is archaic, both linguistically (its language is similar to that used in the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom) and politically (it alludes to the importance of Memphis as the first royal city). As such, Henri Frankfort, John Wilson, Miriam Lichtheim, and Erik Iversen have also assessed the stone to be from the Old Kingdom. However, Friedrich Junge and most other scholars since then have argued that the monument was produced in the Twenty-fifth Dynasty. Today, scholars feel it is clear that it cannot predate the Nineteenth Dynasty. Composition The stela is around wide, with the left side height estimated at and the right side about . The written surface is in width and on average, in height. The rectangular hole in the center is , with eleven radiating