Darius I's Behistun Inscription
- Date
- c. 520 BCE
- Category
- Culture, arts & philosophy
- Region
- Persia (Iran)
- Era
- Classical Antiquity
- Significance
After Darius I (r. 522–486 BCE) seized the Achaemenid throne and suppressed a wave of revolts, he had a monumental relief and inscription carved high on a cliff at Mount Behistun (Bisotun) in western Iran, around 520 BCE.
The text, written in three languages and scripts, Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian (Akkadian), gives Darius's genealogy, asserts his divinely sanctioned right to rule, and recounts his victories over rival claimants. As a piece of royal ideology it justified a contested succession and projected imperial authority across a multilingual empire. Its lasting importance, however, is scholarly: as the longest known trilingual cuneiform text, it served, much as the Rosetta Stone did for Egyptian hieroglyphs, as the key to deciphering cuneiform. In the 19th century Henry Rawlinson's copies enabled scholars to read Old Persian and then the Elamite and Babylonian scripts, founding the discipline of Assyriology.
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Empires active in c. 520 BCE
- Achaemenid Empire550 BCE – 330 BCE
- Roman Kingdom753 BCE – 509 BCE
- Scythians800 BCE – 300 BCE
- Carthaginian Empire650 BCE – 146 BCE
- Zhou Dynasty1046 BCE – 256 BCE
- Kingdom of Kush1070 BCE – 350 CE
Related culture, arts & philosophy events
- Life and teaching of Confucius in China551–479 BCE
- Panini composes the Ashtadhyayi, the first systematic grammarc. 400 BCE
- Pythagoras founds his school at Crotonc. 530 BCE
- Nok Terracotta Sculpture Tradition Flourishesc. 500 BCE
- Thales of Miletus and the predicted eclipse: the dawn of natural philosophy28 May 585 BCE (traditional)
- Construction of the Parthenon in Periclean Athens447–432 BCE
Further reading
The wider story
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