Behistun inscription — archaeological site
Patrick C, known as dynamomosquito on Flickr, and Pentocelo on this project · CC BY-SA 2.0

Behistun inscription

  • 2 min read
  • 34.390° N 47.436° E
  • UNESCO World Heritage

Interesting facts

  • In 1847 a Kurdish boy hired by Rawlinson wedged pegs into the rock, swung across an overhang on ropes and took paper casts of the Babylonian text from a cradle.
  • The Old Persian version runs to 414 lines in five columns, the Elamite to 260 lines in eight columns, and the Babylonian to 112 lines.
  • An Aramaic copy of Darius's text on papyrus, made under Darius II, turned up at Elephantine in Egypt during German excavations of 1906–1908.
  • That Elephantine papyrus is the only known Aramaic version of any Achaemenid royal inscription, although Aramaic was the empire's everyday administrative language.
  • The name Behistun goes back to the Old Persian Bagastana, meaning roughly "the place of the god" or "place of the gods".
  • Early European visitors badly misread the relief: one took it for Christ and his twelve apostles, another for the Lost Tribes of Israel.
  • The last captive, the Scythian chief Skunkha in his pointed cap, was added after the carving was finished, and part of the text was cut away to fit him.
  • Expeditions by the British Museum in 1904 and the University of Michigan in 1948 made casts and photographs that recovered passages Rawlinson had never copied.
  • Rainwater has dissolved parts of the inscribed limestone while laying down fresh mineral crusts over other lines of text.
  • Pietro della Valle sketched the monument in 1604, and Carsten Niebuhr examined it in 1764 on an expedition sent by King Frederick V of Denmark.

Why it is worth it

High on a limestone cliff above the old road between Babylon and Ecbatana, Darius the Great had his own story carved in three languages. The Behistun inscription is about 15 metres high and 25 metres wide and sits roughly 100 metres above the ground, far out of reach — which is exactly why it survived. It was cut some time after Darius took the Persian throne in 522 BC, and it tells how he fought nineteen battles in a single year against rebels and impostors after the death of Cambyses II. The texts are in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian, making it the longest trilingual cuneiform inscription known.

In the relief above the text Darius stands life-size, bow in hand, one foot on the chest of a prostrate figure usually identified as the pretender Gaumata. Nine captive "liar kings", roped at the neck, stand before him, a winged symbol floats overhead and two attendants wait behind. Binoculars help: the king's beard is a separate block fixed with iron pins and lead, and one prisoner was clearly squeezed in after the rest were finished. Much later the cliff took damage from soldiers using it for target practice during the Second World War.

The inscription's great role was in the decipherment of cuneiform. Henry Rawlinson, a British officer, scaled the cliff in the 1830s and 1840s to copy the Old Persian text, and by 1847 had a full and accurate copy in Europe; the Babylonian version, cracked with its help, opened up Mesopotamian writing as a whole. Behistun became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2006. The protected area covers 116 hectares and holds much more than Darius: a reclining Heracles carved for a Seleucid governor in 148 BC, Parthian reliefs of Mithridates II and Gotarzes II, the rock-face called Farhad Tarash, and Ilkhanid and Safavid caravanserais along the road.

Getting there

The site lies in Kermanshah Province in western Iran, about 19 km from the town of Harsin. Kermanshah's Shahid Ashrafi Esfahani Airport (KSH) is about 26 km away and has flights from Tehran and other Iranian cities; Kermanshah also has a railway station and bus links, and taxis are the easiest way out to the site.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Iran 48The Most Remarkable Archaeological Sites in Iran 6The Greatest Archaeological Wonders in Iran 8The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Iran 13The Most Remarkable Ancient Archaeological Sites 36The Greatest Ancient Archaeological Wonders 52The Most Remarkable Ancient Places 78The Most Remarkable UNESCO-Listed Archaeological Sites 114The Greatest UNESCO-Listed Archaeological Wonders 149The Most Remarkable Archaeological Sites 193The Greatest Archaeological Wonders 306The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites 557

From the encyclopaedia

The Behistun inscription is a multilingual Achaemenid royal inscription and large rock relief on a cliff at Mount Behistun in the Kermanshah Province of Iran, near the city of Kermanshah in western Iran, established by Darius the Great. It was important to the decipherment of cuneiform, as it is the longest known trilingual cuneiform inscription, written in Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

34.39036, 47.43589per Wikidata