Darius I's Behistun Inscription
Darius I had an inscription carved into a cliff at Behistun in western Iran around 520 BC, a hundred metres above the road, explaining how he had taken the throne. It runs to about 1,200 lines in three languages — Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian — with a relief showing Darius facing nine bound rebel kings, his foot on a tenth, under the winged figure of Ahura Mazda. Its content is a political defence. Darius was not the son of a king, and the account he gives is that Cambyses secretly killed his own brother Bardiya before going to Egypt; that a magus named Gaumata then impersonated the dead prince and seized the throne; and that Darius and six companions killed the impostor and restored the rightful line. He then lists nineteen battles in one year against nine rebel kings across the empire. Almost every historian since Herodotus has suspected that Darius killed the real Bardiya and invented the impostor, and the inscription is the only substantial source for the version it wants believed. Its accidental importance is greater than its intended one. Henry Rawlinson copied the Old Persian text between 1835 and 1843 by hanging off ladders and having a Kurdish boy climb to the inaccessible sections, and used the trilingual parallel to work out the cuneiform script. That decipherment opened Akkadian and Sumerian, and with them the whole written record of Mesopotamia. Behistun is to cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone is to hieroglyphs. Darius had copies distributed across the empire in local languages, one of which survives on papyrus from a Jewish garrison in Egypt.
- Year: 521 BCE
- Category: Political
