The Behistun Inscription is a multilingual inscription and large rock relief on a cliff in western Iran, made sometime between 522 BC and 486 BC.
The inscription provides a lengthy sequence of events following the death of Cyrus the Great in which King Darius fought nineteen battles in a period of one year to put down multiple rebellions throughout the Persian Empire.
Darius proclaimed himself victorious in all battles during the period of upheaval, attributing his success to the "grace of Ahura Mazda" his god. The inscription includes three versions of the same text, written in three different cuneiform script languages: Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian.
The inscription is to cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone is to Egyptian hieroglyphs: the document most crucial in the deciphering of a forgotten written language.
Although Darius makes it clear in the work that he wanted people to read his words, and even though he placed them on a well-traveled road between Babylon and Media (two of the major administrative centers of his empire), he placed them so high on the cliff that no one on the road would have been able to read the inscriptions or see the images clearly.
Further, once the relief was carved and the inscriptions complete, he had the ledge the workers had stood on removed so no one could get close enough to deface the work. Removal of the ledge, however, also meant no one could get close enough to read it.
The roadway inscription has the Old Persian text in five columns; the Elamite text in eight columns, and the Babylonian text. A copy of the text in Aramaic, written during the reign of Darius II, was found in Egypt.
After the fall of the Persian Empire's Achaemenid Dynasty and its successors, and the lapse of Old Persian cuneiform writing into disuse, the nature of the inscription was forgotten
German surveyor Carsten Niebuhr visited in around 1764 for Frederick V of Denmark, publishing a copy of the inscription in the account of his journeys in 1778. Niebuhr's transcriptions were used by Grotefend and others in their efforts to decipher the Old Persian cuneiform script. Grotefend had deciphered ten of the 37 symbols of Old Persian by 1802, after realizing that unlike the Semitic cuneiform scripts, Old Persian text is alphabetic
Of course, there's a more enjoyable way to learn about this, it's reading pages 115 to 126 of Hendrik Van Loon's book Ancient Man, The Beginning of Civilizations. Written in 1920.
Van Loon is one of my favorite authors, and he illustrated his own books beautifully, and did an amazing trick of making what he wrote, easy to enjoy. I just learned more about Egyptians, Sumerians, Mesopotamians, Phoenicians, and how writing was invented and how to read some of the hieroglyphics and cuneiform than I would have imagined possible in a single 200 page book.
