In brief. Darius I took the Persian throne around 522 BCE after a period of revolts. He had a relief and a long inscription carved high on a rock face at Bisotun, near Kermanshah, to present his version of events.
Bisotun lies on an old road across the Zagros mountains, close to Kermanshah. High above the road, on a smoothed part of the cliff, Darius I had himself shown standing over a defeated rebel, with other prisoners roped in a line behind. Around the relief he had a long text carved in three languages: Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian.
The story the king told
Darius says that the previous king, Cambyses, died and that a man called Gaumata, a magus, claimed to be Cambyses’ brother Bardiya and seized power. Darius says he killed the impostor and then, within a year, defeated a series of rebellions in provinces across the empire. The text gives the date and place of each battle, and says repeatedly that he succeeded because of the god Ahura Mazda and that he did not lie.
Many historians doubt that the story is true as told. They suggest the “impostor” may have been the real Bardiya, and that Darius, who was not in the main royal line, needed a justification for taking the throne. The insistence that he does not lie is itself a clue.
The inscription is best read as a political statement written by the winner, and for exactly that reason it is a valuable record of how Darius wanted the empire to understand his rule.
Three languages, one key
Placing the same text in three scripts made the monument a powerful tool for scholars much later. In the 19th century the British officer and scholar Henry Rawlinson climbed to copy the inscription, and his work, with that of others, helped to decipher Babylonian cuneiform. Old Persian, which had a short, mostly syllabic script, was deciphered first. This opened the door to reading the writings of Mesopotamia.
The monument carries the same account in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian, and it was copied and studied in the 19th century, leading to the decipherment of the cuneiform scripts.
Why it matters
Bisotun is a rare case of a king’s own words on a founding crisis. It is also one of the oldest places where the Old Persian language is written. The site, listed by UNESCO in 2006, is still hard to study because the inscription is so far above the ground.
Notes and sources
- Amélie Kuhrt, The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period (Routledge, 2007).
- Pierre Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire, trans. Peter T. Daniels (Eisenbrauns, 2002).
- R. Schmitt, The Bisitun Inscriptions of Darius the Great: Old Persian Text (Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum I.1.1, London, 1991).
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