The Behistun Inscription: A King on a Cliff

On the old royal road from Babylon to Ecbatana, a limestone cliff rises from the plain at Bisotun in western Iran. High on its face, far out of reach, a relief shows a king with his foot on a fallen man. Nine bound captives stand before him, roped together at the neck. Above them floats a figure in a winged disc. Around the relief run columns of cuneiform in three languages. In the 1830s and 1840s a young British officer, Henry Rawlinson, climbed ladders and ropes to copy them, and at the most dangerous spot a local boy swung across on ropes to take paper casts. The text he brought down became the key that opened cuneiform, the writing of ancient Mesopotamia.

The inscription

• Carved at the command of Darius I around 520 BCE, soon after he took the Persian throne in 522.
• The same text in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian (Akkadian), the longest trilingual cuneiform inscription known.
• It tells how, after the death of Cambyses, a magus named Gaumata seized the throne claiming to be Cambyses' brother Bardiya, and how Darius and six nobles killed him and Darius then crushed a series of rebellions in a single year.
• Copies were sent around the empire: a fragment of an Akkadian version was found at Babylon, and an Aramaic version on papyrus at Elephantine in Egypt.

Darius's truth, and ours

Darius's account is the official version. Several historians, beginning in the nineteenth century, have suspected that the "false Bardiya" was the real Bardiya, and that Darius, from a side branch of the royal family, was the usurper who then wrote the story. Others accept Darius's account. Herodotus tells a similar story, perhaps from Persian sources that go back to Darius's own propaganda. The question is genuinely open.

Symbology and sacred encoding

"By the favour of Ahuramazda." The phrase recurs again and again: Darius rules and wins by the will of Ahuramazda, the Wise Lord, the supreme god of Zoroastrian religion. The rebels, in turn, are driven by "the Lie" (drauga), the opposite of truth and order (arta). Whether Darius was a Zoroastrian in the full sense is debated, but the religious language of truth against the Lie is unmistakably Iranian (see Zoroaster, ch06).

The winged figure. The figure in the winged disc above the relief is often identified as Ahuramazda; others read it as the royal fortune or glory (farnah), or a guardian spirit (fravashi). The identification is disputed.

A new script for a king. Old Persian cuneiform may have been invented for Darius for inscriptions like this one; Darius himself claims to have made a new form of writing. It was never an everyday script.

Connections

Zoroaster (ch06) and Sacred Kingship (ch49), with Mesopotamia (ch03) for the Babylonian version. Compare the Cyrus Cylinder (V35), the Rosetta Stone (V53) and the Ishtar Gate (V52).

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/behistun-inscription.html