Behistun Inscription

The Behistun inscription is a great carved relief and royal text high on a limestone cliff at Mount Behistun, near Kermanshah in western Iran. It was made for Darius the Great, king of the Achaemenid Empire from 522 to 486 BCE, to tell how he won the throne. Because the same text is written in three languages in cuneiform script, it became the key that allowed nineteenth-century scholars to read the lost writing systems of ancient Mesopotamia.

The place name comes from the Old Persian Bagastana, usually explained as "the place of god". The cliff overlooks an ancient road that linked Babylon with Ecbatana, the old Median capital, so the monument faced one of the busiest routes in the empire. The carving sits about 100 metres up the rock face and measures roughly 15 metres high by 25 metres wide.

The text opens with Darius's family tree, tracing him back through five generations to Achaemenes, from whom the dynasty took its name, and lists the 23 lands he claimed to rule. Most of it then narrates the turmoil after the death of Cambyses II, son of Cyrus the Great. According to Darius, a series of impostors and rebels proclaimed themselves kings across the empire, and he crushed them in nineteen battles within a single year ending in December 521 BCE, thanks to the favour of the god Ahura Mazda. The account is the king's own: it chooses its places, dates and figures to lend the story credibility and ties each victory to divine approval.

The Old Persian version fills five columns totalling 414 lines; the Elamite spreads 260 lines over eight columns, and the Babylonian, a form of Akkadian, has 112 lines. An Aramaic copy written under the later king Darius II was found in Egypt. Above the inscriptions a life-sized Darius, holding a bow, sets his foot on a fallen figure usually identified as the pretender Gaumata. Two attendants stand behind him and nine captives, roped together at the neck, face him, while a winged symbol hovers overhead. One captive, wearing a pointed Scythian hat, was added after the scene was finished, which meant erasing part of the text, and the king's beard is a separate block fixed with iron pins and lead. The composition closely resembles a much older relief of the Lullubi king Anubanini at nearby Sarpol-e Zahab, of around 2300 BCE, and its sculptors may have known it.

The cliff remained a landmark long after the Achaemenids fell. Kings of the Parthian Empire added reliefs of their own, including ones of Mithridates II and Gotarzes II, and the wider complex includes a Parthian town and cult site and a statue of Hercules. A palace there is traditionally attributed to the Sasanian king Khosrau II, and caravanserais were built under the Ilkhanate and the Safavid Empire. Iranian authorities have registered 18 historic monuments in the complex besides the inscription.

Once Old Persian cuneiform fell out of use, the meaning of the carving was forgotten. When the English traveller Robert Sherley saw it in 1598, on a mission to Safavid Persia, his party thought it was Christian. Later visitors suggested Christ and the apostles, or the Lost Tribes of Israel.

The German surveyor Carsten Niebuhr copied the inscription around 1764 and published his drawings in 1778. Working from such copies, Georg Friedrich Grotefend had identified ten of the 37 Old Persian signs by 1802. From 1835 Henry Rawlinson, a British East India Company officer, scaled the cliff, aided by a local boy, and transcribed the Old Persian section; the Elamite and Babylonian panels, much harder to reach, had to wait. By 1847 he had sent a complete and reliable transcript to Europe, and the trilingual text became central to the decipherment of cuneiform. Expeditions from the British Museum in 1904 and the University of Michigan in 1948 made casts, photographs and better readings.

The rock has suffered from rainwater, which has dissolved some of the text and coated other parts with new limestone. During the Second World War, including the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran, Allied soldiers damaged it by using it for target practice. Iranian archaeologists began recording the damage with photogrammetry in 1999, and conservation has continued since. The site, under the name Bisotun, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2006 and lies in modern Iran.