Behistun Inscription

The Behistun Inscription is a monumental multilingual rock inscription and relief carved high on a limestone cliff at Mount Behistun in western Iran, commissioned by the Achaemenid king Darius the Great in the years following his seizure of the Persian throne around 522 BC. The same proclamation, an account of Darius's victory over a rival claimant and the rebellions he suppressed in his first year, is carved three times in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian cuneiform, accompanied by a large relief showing Darius triumphant over bound captives. Because the three versions record essentially the same text, the inscription served the same decipherment function for cuneiform that the Rosetta Stone served for Egyptian hieroglyphs: Henry Rawlinson's dangerous copying of the text from the cliff face in the 1830s and 1840s, and his subsequent decipherment of the Old Persian and then Babylonian versions, opened the whole of Mesopotamian cuneiform literature to modern scholarship. The site remains in situ on the cliff and was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2006.