Qualla: Behistun Inscription

Behistun Inscription: Introduction

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Leen van Dorp, CC0. For centuries, nobody could read it. European travelers stared up at the enormous carving on the cliff face near Kermanshah, Iran, and invented explanations. A French general saw Christ and his twelve apostles. A British artist saw the Lost Tribes of Israel. An Italian explorer made drawings but could not decipher a single word. The inscription had been carved around 520 BC by order of Darius the Great, King of Kings of the Persian Empire, in three languages that the modern world had forgotten how to read. It would take a British army officer, a local boy brave enough to scale a sheer cliff, and decades of painstaking scholarship to crack the code -- and in doing so, unlock the entire written history of ancient Mesopotamia.

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Image: Leen van Dorp | CC0

Behistun Inscription: The King's Billboard

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Patrick C, known as dynamomosquito on Flickr, and Pentocelo on this project, CC BY-SA 2.0. Darius chose his location with a propagandist's instinct. The inscription sits roughly 100 meters up a limestone cliff beside an ancient road connecting Babylon to Ecbatana, the twin capitals of his empire. Every official, merchant, and soldier passing between Mesopotamia and Med...

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Image: Patrick C, known as dynamomosquito on Flickr, and Pentocelo on this project | CC BY-SA 2.0

Behistun Inscription: Three Languages, One Boast

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alborz Fallah (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. The inscription tells its story three times. The Old Persian text runs 414 lines across five columns. The Elamite version covers 260 lines in eight columns. The Babylonian text compresses the account into 112 lines. Darius's autobiography begins with his lineage, traces his coron...

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Image: Alborz Fallah (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Behistun Inscription: The Man Who Climbed the Cliff

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown artist, Public domain. Henry Rawlinson arrived in Persia in 1835 as a British East India Company officer. The inscription consumed him. He scaled the cliff himself to copy the Old Persian text, a feat requiring both mountaineering skill and scholarly nerve. The Elamite text lay across a chasm. The Baby...

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Image: Unknown artist | Public domain

Behistun Inscription: Damage and Preservation

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit KendallKDown, CC BY-SA 3.0. The inscription has survived 2,500 years of weather and considerably less time of human violence. Rainwater has dissolved portions of the limestone while depositing new layers over other sections, obscuring text that Rawlinson never copied. During World War II, Allied soldiers us...

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Image: KendallKDown | CC BY-SA 3.0

Behistun Inscription: Why It Still Matters

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Patrick C, known as dynamomosquito on Flickr, and Pentocelo on this project, CC BY-SA 2.0. Without Behistun, we might still be unable to read Sumerian, Akkadian, or Babylonian. The inscription's trilingual format -- the same text in three cuneiform scripts -- gave scholars the leverage they needed to decode languages that had been silent for two thousand years. Expedit...

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Image: Patrick C, known as dynamomosquito on Flickr, and Pentocelo on this project | CC BY-SA 2.0