- The Behistun Inscriptions are cuneiform inscriptions written on a rock face on Mount Behistun in Iran, and were ordered by Darius the great (522-486 BCE) to describe his achievements.
- The inscriptions became the Rosetta Stone of Cuneiform Clay Tablets, because they were written simultaneously in Old Persian, Babylonian and Elamite text.
The Rock Relief
- Mount Behistun is 326 miles (525km) west of Tehran.
- The Inscription is written in Cuneiform and describes Darius and his Battles to achieve power.
- Written in three languages, it is the first known use of the word ‘Magi’ to describe the Priests of Zoroastrianism.
Decoding Cuneiform
- In 1835, an East India Company Army Officer, Henry Rawlinson, visited the ‘Behistun Inscriptions’ in Iran.
- He climbed up the rock face and copied the cuneiform Old Persian Text, then compared it to Herodotus’ King List to get the symbols and names. Using a part translation of the syllables already undertaken by the German Epigraphist Georg Friedrich Grotefend, he was able by 1838 to decipher the texts for the first time in almost two thousand years.
- He later returned and made paper-mache casts of the other inscriptions, and using the Old Persian Text was then able to decipher the Babylonian and Elamite Text..
- Further help in the decipherment of Cuneiform came in 1842, when the city of Nineveh in Iraq was uncovered, revealing the Library of Ashurbanipal which contained tens of thousands of Cuneiform Clay Tablets.
Mount Behistun, Iran