Behistun Inscription

When Cambyses II died in 522 BC, a man Darius calls Gaumata seized the throne claiming to be Cambyses's brother Bardiya. Darius and six fellow conspirators killed him and took power, a coup Darius then spent roughly a year defending as satraps and pretenders across the empire tried to exploit the succession crisis.

High on a cliff above the road linking Babylon and Ecbatana, Darius had the story of that year carved in three cuneiform scripts and languages, Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian, running to some 1,200 lines. Speaking throughout in the first person, Thus says Darius the king, the text narrates his defeat of Gaumata and nine subsequent rebel leaders by name and region, from Elam and Babylon to Media, Parthia, and the Scythian steppe. Above the text, a relief shows Darius with his foot planted on the prostrate Gaumata, facing nine bound captive kings roped by the neck, while the winged figure of Ahuramazda hovers overhead in blessing.

The inscription insists at every turn that Darius acted only under Ahuramazda's protection and only on the side of what Old Persian calls arta, the Truth, against drauga, the Lie, casting rebellion itself as a form of lying and himself as its opposite. Darius explicitly ordered the text copied and circulated through the empire: fragments of an Aramaic version turned up centuries later on papyrus at Elephantine in Egypt, evidence that the message was deliberately pushed out from the mountain to the provinces. The text closes with a warning to future kings and vandals alike not to damage or suppress it, and a promise that Ahuramazda will destroy the house of anyone who does.

Because the same content survives in three distinct cuneiform systems, Behistun did for Mesopotamian writing what the Rosetta Stone did for Egyptian. The British officer Henry Rawlinson spent years in the 1830s and 1840s scaling the cliff on ropes to copy the text, and his work, cross-checked against Edward Hincks and Julius Oppert, cracked Old Persian cuneiform, a breakthrough that then supplied the leverage to decipher Babylonian and Elamite. The monument, near modern Kermanshah, was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2006.