Behistun Inscription: Darius the Great and Decoding Cuneiform

The Behistun Inscription is a monumental relief and cuneiform text carved around 520 BC on a limestone cliff at Mount Behistun (modern Bisotun) in western Iran. In it the Persian king Darius I tells, in three languages, how he seized the throne and defeated a series of rebels. More than two thousand years later it became the key that allowed scholars to read cuneiform, the wedge-shaped writing of ancient Mesopotamia and Iran.

Background: a contested succession

In the 520s BC the Achaemenid Persian Empire, founded by Cyrus the Great, stretched from Anatolia and Egypt to Central Asia. Cyrus’s son Cambyses II ruled from 530 to 522 BC and conquered Egypt. While he was away, a man claiming to be his younger brother Bardiya (called Smerdis by the Greeks) took power in Persia in the spring of 522 BC.

Cambyses died on his way home, in circumstances that remain unclear. A few months later, in September 522 BC, a group of seven Persian nobles led by Darius, son of Hystaspes, killed the ruler in a fortress in Media. Darius then took the throne. His own version of these events, set out at Behistun, is the most detailed source for the crisis. For the coup itself, see Darius I seizes the Persian throne.

What the inscription says

The Old Persian text opens with Darius’s titles: great king, king of kings, king in Persia, king of the lands, son of Hystaspes and an Achaemenid. He traces his ancestry back to Achaemenes, presenting himself as the rightful heir of the royal house.

He then gives his account of the crisis. According to Darius, Cambyses had secretly killed his brother Bardiya before going to Egypt. A Magian (a member of a priestly group) named Gaumata pretended to be Bardiya and won over the people. No one dared oppose him until Darius, with the help of the god Ahuramazda and a few loyal men, killed him on the tenth day of the month Bagayadi, which corresponds to 29 September 522 BC.

The rest of the text describes a year of warfare. Revolts broke out in Elam, Babylonia, Media, Persia, Armenia, Parthia, Margiana and elsewhere. Darius says he fought 19 battles and captured nine kings within a single year. Each rebel is described as a “liar” who falsely claimed a royal title. The text ends with warnings to future kings to protect the monument and to punish lies, and with a list of the six nobles who helped Darius.

The relief and the three languages

Above the text is a carved scene. Darius, larger than everyone else, stands with his left foot on the body of Gaumata, who lies on his back with his arms raised. Behind the king stand two attendants carrying a bow and a spear. Before him is a line of nine captive rebel leaders, roped together at the neck with their hands tied. Above them hovers a winged figure, usually identified with Ahuramazda.

A tenth captive was added later: Skunkha, a Scythian chief wearing a tall pointed cap, defeated in a campaign around 519 BC. Making room for him meant cutting away part of the Elamite text, which was then re-carved elsewhere on the rock.

The inscription is written in three languages, all in cuneiform scripts:

• Old Persian, the language of the Persian court, in five columns beneath the relief.
• Elamite, the administrative language of southwestern Iran.
• Babylonian (a form of Akkadian), the prestige language of Mesopotamia.

In one passage Darius says he made a new form of writing “in Aryan”, which many scholars take to mean that the Old Persian cuneiform script was created under his rule, possibly for this very monument. This interpretation is widely held but still debated.

A monument meant to be copied

The carving sits roughly 100 metres up the cliff, beside the main road between Babylon and Ecbatana (modern Hamadan). After it was finished, the stone ledge below was cut away, so no one could climb up to damage it. As a result the text cannot be read from the ground.

Darius, however, wanted his story known. The inscription itself says copies were sent throughout the empire. This was confirmed by finds: a fragment of a Babylonian version on a stone monument at Babylon, and an Aramaic version written on papyrus at Elephantine, a Persian garrison on the Nile in southern Egypt, which was still being copied about a century later.

Key people

• Darius I (ruled 522-486 BC): the king who commissioned the monument and went on to build Persepolis and reorganise the empire.
• Gaumata: the man Darius described as a Magian impostor. Whether he was really an impostor or the genuine Bardiya is one of the great unsolved questions of Persian history.
• Georg Friedrich Grotefend (1775-1853): a German schoolteacher who in 1802 identified the names of Darius, Xerxes and Hystaspes in Old Persian inscriptions from Persepolis.
• Henry Creswicke Rawlinson (1810-1895): a British East India Company officer who copied the inscription at great personal risk and published the first full translation of the Old Persian text.
• Edward Hincks (1792-1866): an Irish clergyman whose insights into the Babylonian script, such as the fact that signs could have several values, were crucial to its decipherment.

Rawlinson and the decipherment of cuneiform

Rawlinson arrived in Persia in 1833 as a military adviser to the Persian army. Between 1835 and 1837 he climbed the cliff, often balancing on ladders on the narrow remaining ledge, to copy the Old Persian text. Working from these copies, and building on Grotefend’s earlier work and on comparisons with Avestan and Sanskrit, he published his translation of the Old Persian version in 1846-1847.

The Babylonian text was harder to reach because it was carved on an overhanging rock. In 1847 Rawlinson returned and, with the help of a local Kurdish boy who swung across the rock face on ropes, took paper casts (squeezes) of it. The Elamite version was also copied and was studied in the 1850s by Edwin Norris.

Babylonian cuneiform was far more complex than Old Persian. It used hundreds of signs, many with more than one sound value, and mixed signs for whole words with signs for syllables. Using the Old Persian version as a guide, especially the personal and place names, Rawlinson, Hincks, the French-German scholar Julius Oppert and others gradually worked out the system.

In 1857 the Royal Asiatic Society in London ran a famous test. Rawlinson, Hincks, Oppert and William Henry Fox Talbot were each sent a copy of a newly found inscription of the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser I and asked to translate it independently, in sealed envelopes. Their versions agreed closely, convincing scholars that Akkadian cuneiform had truly been deciphered. This opened up hundreds of thousands of clay tablets and gave birth to Assyriology, the study of ancient Mesopotamia. For the origins of the script itself, see the invention of cuneiform writing.

Myths and facts

Myth: the inscription was made by Queen Semiramis. This idea is ancient. The Greek historian Ctesias, as reported by Diodorus of Sicily, attributed the monument at “Bagistanon” to the legendary Assyrian queen Semiramis. In fact the inscription names Darius I throughout.

Myth: Rawlinson deciphered cuneiform on his own. Rawlinson’s copies and translations were essential, but decipherment was a collective effort. Grotefend made the first breakthrough in Old Persian, and Hincks and Oppert solved many of the hardest problems in Babylonian, sometimes ahead of Rawlinson.

Myth: the inscription is an objective record. It is royal propaganda, written to justify Darius’s kingship. Its account broadly fits Babylonian dated documents from the period, but it presents only the winner’s view, and the Greek historian Herodotus tells a related but different version of the story.

Timeline

• 522 BC, March: A ruler calling himself Bardiya takes power in Persia while Cambyses II is away.
• 522 BC, summer: Cambyses dies on his return from Egypt.
• 522 BC, 29 September: Darius and six fellow nobles kill the ruler Darius calls Gaumata.
• 522-521 BC: Darius suppresses revolts across the empire, claiming 19 battles and nine captured kings.
• c. 520-519 BC: The relief and inscription are carved at Behistun; the figure of Skunkha is added soon after.
• 1802: Grotefend identifies royal names in Old Persian cuneiform.
• 1835-1837: Rawlinson copies the Old Persian text on the cliff.
• 1846-1847: Rawlinson publishes his translation of the Old Persian version.
• 1857: The Royal Asiatic Society test confirms that Akkadian cuneiform can be read.
• 2006: Bisotun is inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Legacy

Today the Behistun Inscription is one of the most important historical documents of the ancient Near East. It is the longest Old Persian text known and the main source for the reign of Darius I’s early years. The site also preserves later monuments, including a Seleucid-era statue of Herakles reclining, dated by its Greek inscription to 148 BC, and Parthian reliefs.

Its greatest legacy is scholarly. In much the same way that the Rosetta Stone opened up Egyptian hieroglyphs, Behistun made it possible to read the languages of Sumer, Babylon and Assyria, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to legal codes and royal annals.

Why it matters

The Behistun Inscription is both a political statement and a scholarly breakthrough. It shows how an ancient king used words and images to legitimise power across a vast, multilingual empire. And by preserving the same text in three scripts, it gave the modern world the key to some three thousand years of written history in the Middle East.