A King's Edict on a Cliff
On a limestone cliff face in western Iran, 100 meters above an ancient road, is a massive carving measuring 15 meters high and 25 meters wide. This is the Behistun Inscription, a piece of political autobiography created by Darius I of the Achaemenid Empire around 520 BCE. The text is a declaration of how Darius took the throne after the death of his predecessor, Cambyses II, and subsequently defeated numerous rebellions across the empire.
The inscription is written in three different languages using cuneiform script: Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian (a later form of Akkadian). The Old Persian text consists of 414 lines, the Elamite has 260 lines, and the Babylonian has 112. Accompanying the text is a life-sized bas-relief. It depicts Darius holding a bow, with his left foot on the chest of the usurper Gaumata. Before him stand a line of nine captured rebel leaders, bound with a rope around their necks. Above them floats a Faravahar, a symbol of divinity in ancient Persia, representing the supreme god Ahura Mazda, to whom Darius attributes his success.
Darius's account details his accession to the throne in 522 BCE and the 19 battles he fought in a single year to solidify his rule over the Persian Empire. The location was chosen specifically because it overlooked a major ancient road connecting the capitals of Babylonia and Media, ensuring his message of power and legitimacy would be widely seen.
Deciphering the Code
For centuries, the meaning of cuneiform was lost. The Behistun Inscription became essential to its decipherment, like the Rosetta Stone did for Egyptian hieroglyphs. The breakthrough came from the work of Sir Henry Rawlinson, a British army officer stationed in Iran in the 1830s and 1840s.
Accessing the inscription was exceptionally dangerous. Rawlinson had to scale the sheer cliff face, sometimes with the help of a local boy, to transcribe the texts. He began with the Old Persian script, which was the simplest of the three. By comparing a list of Persian kings in the text with the same list known from the Greek historian Herodotus, he was able to assign correct values to the cuneiform characters. He successfully translated the Old Persian text by 1838.
This initial success allowed scholars to tackle the more complex Elamite and Babylonian scripts. Because all three texts recorded the same message, Rawlinson and other scholars could use the known Old Persian as a guide. By 1857, the Mesopotamian cuneiform script was successfully deciphered, revealing historical records from ancient Assyria and Babylonia.