Behistun Inscription

Also called Bisitun Inscription, Behistun relief, Bisotun Inscription

A vast relief and inscription cut into a limestone cliff in western Iran, in three languages and three scripts — the text that let scholars read cuneiform, and so the reason every other Mesopotamian document in this atlas can be read at all.

Object: Bas-relief and trilingual cuneiform inscription — Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian — cut into a limestone cliff about 60 m above the road
Found at: Mount Bisotun, Kermanshah Province, Iran, on the old route between the Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia
Found in: Never lost and never found — the monument has been visible on the cliff since it was cut. It was first copied in full by Henry Creswicke Rawlinson in campaigns beginning in 1835
Found by: Not applicable. Rawlinson, a British officer in Persia, had himself lowered on ropes to copy it; he sent a complete copy to Europe by 1847 and published his decipherment from 1846
Dates from: c. 520 BC — UNESCO dates the commission to 521 BC, and the campaigns it recounts ran through 522-520 BC
Now held at: In situ on the cliff at the Bisotun archaeological site, Iran — a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2006

Darius Explains Himself

About sixty metres up a cliff face on the old road between Babylon and Ecbatana, Darius I had his account of his accession carved where nobody could reach it to deface it. A relief shows the king with his foot on a fallen rival and a line of nine captive kings roped at the neck; around and below it, the same text runs in Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian. It describes how Darius came to the throne, how he put down rebellion after rebellion in the first year, and how the god Ahura Mazda gave him the kingdom.

As history it must be read with care. Darius was not the obvious heir, and his account — that the man he killed was an impostor magus named Gaumata impersonating Cyrus's son Bardiya, who had already been secretly murdered — is a very convenient story for a usurper to tell. Herodotus repeats a version of it, having probably got it from Persian sources downstream of this very inscription. Historians have debated the truth of it for a century and a half without resolution. This is royal self-justification carved a hundred feet above the road.

The Key That Opened Cuneiform

Its importance for the Bible is indirect and enormous. In the 1830s and 1840s Henry Rawlinson, a British officer in Persia, had himself lowered on ropes and stood on ladders to copy the inscription. Because the Old Persian script was alphabetic and partly guessable, and because the three versions say the same thing, the trilingual text gave scholars the leverage to work outward into Elamite and then into Akkadian — the language of Assyria and Babylon, written in the cuneiform used across Mesopotamia for three thousand years.

Without that, the Cyrus Cylinder, Sennacherib's Prism, the Babylonian Chronicles, the Amarna letters, the Code of Hammurabi, and the Epic of Gilgamesh would all be handsome, mute objects. Behistun did for cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone did for hieroglyphs. Nearly everything the last two centuries have added to the historical setting of the Old Testament traces back through this cliff.

Darius in Scripture

Darius I appears in the Bible in his own right. Ezra 5-6 has the rebuilding of the temple stalled by local opposition and referred to Darius, who orders a search of the royal archives at Ecbatana, finds Cyrus's original authorisation, and rules in the Jews' favour with funding attached. Haggai and Zechariah both date their preaching by his regnal years.

It is worth distinguishing him from the Darius of Daniel 6, called Darius the Mede, who is a separate and much-debated figure — the identification of that Darius with any known Persian or Median ruler remains an unsolved problem, and this inscription does not solve it.

Scripture references

Ezra 5:6-17 — The provincial governor's letter referring the temple question to Darius
Ezra 6:1-12 — Darius searches the archives and confirms Cyrus's decree
Haggai 1:1 — "In the second year of Darius the king"
Zechariah 1:1 — Zechariah dated by the same reign

Sources

Holding institutionL. W. King and R. C. Thompson, The Sculptures and Inscription of Darius the Great on the Rock of Behistûn in Persia (1907) — The British Museum expedition that made the squeezes and casts, published by L. W. King and R. C. Thompson · The standard early edition and English translation, public domain, hosted in full on WikisourceSupports: The content of the inscription and Darius's account of his accession
ScholarshipH. C. Rawlinson, The Persian Cuneiform Inscription at Behistun, Decyphered and Translated (1846) — Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, Royal Asiatic Society · The publication that broke Old Persian open, with continuations in 1848 and 1849. Public domain and catalogued at the Internet ArchiveSupports: That Rawlinson's copying and decipherment is what made cuneiform readable
ReferenceBible Odyssey (SBL): Cyrus the Messiah — Society of Biblical Literature
EncyclopediaWikipedia: Behistun Inscription