Details

LOT 0278

Achaemenid Silver Bowl with Royal Egyptian Inscription for Darius the Great

6TH-5TH CENTURY B.C.

10 1/2 in. (1.23 kg total, 26.7 cm wide including stand).

Bowl fragment including section of the carinated rim, radiating repoussé teardrop bosses with interstitial lotus-flowers motifs and radiating rosette motif below; incised Egyptian hieroglyphic legend below the rim transliterated as 'ı͗nṯry(p sic )wš pr-ꜤꜢ pꜢ ꜤꜢ' (Darius, the Great Pharaoh); mounted on a custom-made stand.

Provenance

Previously in the private collection of Mr S.A, acquired on the London art market in the 1960s.

Accompanied by a copy of a previous illustrated three page cataloguing/report.
Accompanied by a copy of an IADAA Interpol search certificate.
This lot has been checked against the Interpol Database of stolen works of art and is accompanied by a search certificate number no.12709-235450.
This lot has been cleared against the Art Loss Register database, and is accompanied by an illustrated lot declaration signed by the Head of the Antiquities Department, Dr Raffaele D'Amato.

Literature

Cf. Posener, G., La première domination Perse en Égypte, Bibliothèque d'étude 11, Cairo, 1936, pp.161-162, for examples of the variant hieroglyphic writings of Darius I’s name; Westenholz, J.G., Stolper, M.W., “A Stone Jar with Inscriptions of Darius I in Four Languages,” Arta 005, 2002, for a discussion of the composition of multilingual inscriptions based on a stone vessel from Darius I’s reign; Kuhrt, A., The Persian Empire: a Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period, Oxon/New York, 2010, p.317 Fig.8.1, for a complete, similarly large silver phiale inscribed in Old Persian for Artaxerxes I.

Footnotes

Egyptologist Paul Whelan writes: "The inscription reads: ı͗nṯry(p sic )wš pr-ꜤꜢ pꜢ ꜤꜢ (Darius, the Great Pharaoh). The ancient Egyptians encountered difficulties in rendering the name Darius in hieroglyphs, with at least seventeen known variants. This version differs slightly from those, as it also includes an erroneous ‘p’ hieroglyph. The presence of several cuneiform signs following the hieroglyphs indicates that the phiale likely once featured multilingual versions of the inscription - a practice more commonly found on stone vessels. The epithet ‘the Great Pharaoh’ on this fragment represents one of the earliest examples, appearing more frequently in inscriptions from the reign of Xerxes."

A hieroglyphic inscription on an Achaemenid item is very rare, although examples on stone vessels are known. Darius I 'the Great' ruled from 522 to 486 B.C. His predecessor, Cambyses II, conquered Egypt in 525 B.C. and the presence of this inscription is probably linked to the subsequent rule of the dynasty over Egypt and its influence on the Egyptian priestly caste.