In true Egyptian iconography, the king is depicted wearing the White Crown of Upper Egypt with a uraeus. With arms outstretched to make an offering to a god, he holds a bowl or censer in his left hand. His long and sensitive curving fingers and the soft modeling of the fleshy body were a hallmark of the earlier 29th and 30th Dynasties and continued into the Ptolemaic period. This relief marked by elegant precision of details carries a message: a Hellenistic Greek king ruling Egypt appropriates a royal gesture of offering exclusive to an earlier Egyptian king in an effort to justify his sovereignty.

What is also remarkable is that in the reworking of this mannered and refined image is hidden a second appropriation. The cartouches originally spelling two of the names of the Ptolemaic king, Ptolemy I Soter, had been recarved to form phonetically in Egyptian hieroglyphs the name of the Roman emperor Vespasian (r. AD 69–79): V-SP-I-I-S-I-N-U-S. Adopting a common practice from ancient Egypt (known as usurpation), a later emperor would put his own mark over an existing image of an earlier king.