page_title: Caylus vase
section_title: Confirmation of the antiquity of phonetical hieroglyphs
hierarchical_section_title: Caylus vase / Contribution to the decipherment of cuneiform / Confirmation of the antiquity of phonetical hieroglyphs
caption_attribution_description: English: Tableau Général des signes et groupes hieroglyphiques No 125 (color)
context_page_description: The Caylus vase is a jar in alabaster dedicated in the name of the Achaemenid king Xerxes I in Egyptian hieroglyph and Old Persian cuneiform. It was the key element in confirming the decipherment of Old Persian cuneiform by Grotefend, through the reading of the hieroglyphic part by Champollion in 1823. It also confirmed the antiquity of phonetical hieroglyphs before the time of Alexander the Great, thus corroborating the phonetical decipherment of the names of ancient Egyptian pharaos. The vase was named after Anne Claude de Tubières, count of Caylus, an early French collector, who had acquired the vase in the 18th century, between 1752 and 1765. It is now located in the Cabinet des Médailles, Paris.
context_section_description: Champollion had been confronted to the doubts of various scholars regarding the existence of phonetical hieroglyphs before the time of the Greeks and the Romans in Egypt, especially since Champollion had only proved his phonetic system on the basis of the names of Greek and Roman rulers found in hieroglyphs on Egyptian monuments. Until his decipherment of the Caylus vase, he hadn't found any foreign names earlier than Alexander the Great that were transliterated through alphabetic hieroglyphs, which led to suspicions that they were invented at the time of the Greeks and Romans, and fostered doubts whether phonetical hieroglyphs could be applied to decipher the names of ancient Egyptian Pharaos. For the first time, here was a foreign name ("Xerxes the Great") transcribed phonetically with Egyptians hieroglyphs, already 150 years before Alexander the Great, thereby essentially proving Champollion's thesis. In his Précis du système hiéroglyphique published in 1824, Champollion wrote of this discovery: "It has thus been proved that Egyptian hieroglyphs included phonetic signs, at least since 460 BCE".
caption: Equivalence between the hieroglyph and cuneiform signs for "Xerxes", made by Champollion, in Tableau Général des signes et groupes hieroglyphiques.[19] The cuneiform script is inverted.
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