The Behistun Inscription (DB)

High on a limestone cliff on the old road from Babylon to Ecbatana, some sixty-six metres above the springs on the plain, Darius I had cut a great relief and a long inscription in three languages and scripts. The place was already holy: its Old Persian name, recoverable from the Greek Bagistanon that Ctesias reports, was Bagastāna, "the place, or stand, of the god(s)", and Darius set his monument of victory where the god's own presence was felt.^[5] The relief and its text tell, in the king's own first-person voice, how in 522 BCE he took the throne of a shaken empire, killed a usurper, and in a single furious year put down the rebellions that broke out from Elam to the eastern marches. It is the only Achaemenid royal text that narrates events at all, and it became, twenty-three centuries later, the key that unlocked the whole cuneiform record of the ancient Near East.

The cliff at Bagastāna

The monument sits on the last peak of a long, narrow range, on a rock face that ordinary approach cannot reach. The relief is modest in size for its fame, about three metres high and five and a half wide, called by local people the Nine Dervishes for its row of standing figures. The inscriptions around and below it cover, all told, an area some 7.8 metres high and 22 metres long. When the work was finished the king had the access stairway removed and the path below sheared away, so that no hand could deface or amend what he had set there; for two thousand years the text could be reached only by a hard and dangerous climb. The choice of a triumphal relief high on a Zagros cliff was not without precedent: about 150 kilometres to the west, at Sar-e Pol-e Zohāb, an Old Akkadian-era ruler, Anubanini of the Lullubi, had carved his own victory relief, and the visual scheme at Behistun clearly answers it; certain turns of formula recall the Urartian royal inscriptions as well. Darius may well have passed the cliff in the spring of 521 as he marched from Babylon to Media, and it may have been near this very place that he had won his decisive fight against Gaumāta. The monument was famous in antiquity, though the ancients misread it: Ctesias, reported by Diodorus, took the sheer cliff "sacred to Zeus" (that is, to Ahura Mazdā) and its relief and cuneiform ("Syrian letters") for a monument of the legendary Babylonian queen Semiramis, complete with a park she was said to have laid out below.^[4] That the king's own res gestae could be so thoroughly forgotten and reattributed within a few centuries is a caution in miniature about how quickly the meaning of even a colossal public text can be lost.

The relief: the king, the Lie-kings, and the winged figure

The sculpture is the centrepiece; the great inscriptions, tellingly, are arranged in relation to the relief and not to one another. Darius stands at the left, larger than the rest, his left foot planted on the chest of a prostrate man, his bow held before him, one hand raised toward a figure in a winged disc hovering above the scene. Behind the king stand two of his own men; before him, roped together at the neck and with their hands bound behind them, comes a line of nine defeated rebels, each labelled with a small caption naming him and his lie. The man under Darius's foot is Gaumāta. Above them all floats the winged emblem, long taken by earlier scholars for a portrait of the god Ahura Mazdā himself, though it is now more often read as the royal glory or fortune (khvarnah) that alights on the rightful king (see the winged symbol). Eleven minor inscriptions, cut as close as possible to each figure, identify them: DBa the king, DBb Gaumāta, and DBc–k the nine pretenders. One rebel, Skunkha the Scythian in his tall pointed cap, was added to the end of the queue only later, when a fresh campaign gave the king a further enemy to display; his figure had to be cut into space already occupied by text.

The trilingual text, and how it grew

It is a common surprise that the inscription was not trilingual from the first. Study of the rock has shown that the master text was engraved in stages between the end of Darius's first regnal year, about March 520, and some time after his third, in 518.^[6] The first main version was in Elamite, the language of the old chancellery of the region and the working tongue of the royal court until about 520. The Babylonian (Akkadian) version was added next, on a projecting slope of rock that looks like a huge clay tablet leaning against the cliff. The Old Persian version was added last of all, directly beneath the relief, in five columns of 96, 98, 92, 92 and 36 lines, for a total of 414 lines and roughly 3,600 words; the later, moved Elamite copy runs to 260 lines, and the Babylonian to 112 exceptionally long ones. Every paragraph opens with the same drum-beat, so that the whole reads as the king's own speech:

"By the grace of Ahuramazda am I king; Ahuramazda has granted me the kingdom." — Darius I, the Behistun inscription (DB §5)^[1]

The most remarkable fact about the Old Persian version is buried in its final paragraph. Old Persian cuneiform did not exist before this monument: the script was devised expressly to carve this text, and the king says as much.

"By the will of Ahura Mazda that is my script, which I made. Also, it was in Aryan, and it was placed on clay tablets and parchment. Also, I made my name. Also, I made the lineage. And it was inscribed and was read before me. After that I sent this script everywhere into the lands." — Darius I, the Behistun inscription (DB §70, in Old Persian only; trans. after Schmitt)^[1]

Because the script was new, the words could not simply be written down: the king dictated in Old Persian, bilingual Elamite scribes turned the sentences into Elamite, and the chancellery text became the model for all that followed. The Old Persian is nonetheless the version Darius seems to have regarded as definitive; it was read out to him for approval and shows small edits and omissions that betray a royal hand at work.

The narrative: 522–520 and the year of nineteen battles

The text opens with the king's name, his titles, and his descent, and grounds his right to the throne in his blood:

"My father was Hystaspes; the father of Hystaspes was Arsames; the father of Arsames was Ariaramnes. Eight of my line were kings before me; I am the ninth. In two lines have we been kings." — Darius I, the Behistun inscription (DB §§3–4)^[1]

Then comes a list of twenty-three lands that obeyed him, the oldest surviving catalogue of the empire's provinces, rendered as a claim of obedience and tribute reaching to the edge of a world:

"These are the countries which obeyed me; by the grace of Ahuramazda they were my subjects; they bore tribute to me. Whatever commands were issued to them by me, either by night or by day, that was done." — Darius I, the Behistun inscription (DB §§6–7)^[1]

Then follows the account of the crisis. Cambyses, the reigning king, had secretly killed his own brother Bardiya; while Cambyses was away in Egypt, a Magus named Gaumāta rose in rebellion claiming to be that dead Bardiya, son of Cyrus; Cambyses died; and the impostor held the throne until Darius, with a handful of loyal men, killed him on 29 September 522 at a fortress called Sikayauvatiš in Media. In the king's telling, the whole convulsion is the work of a single cosmic enemy:

"He lied; he said: I am Bardiya, the son of Cyrus." — Darius I, the Behistun inscription (DB §11)^[1]

"The people became hostile, and the Lie multiplied in the land, even in Persia and Media, and in the other provinces." — Darius I, the Behistun inscription (DB §10)^[1]

What follows is a chronicle of revolt. Pretender after pretender rose, each named, each with his province and his fate: Āçina and Nidintu-Bēl in Elam and Babylon, Fravartiš in Media, Martiya, Ciçantaxma, Vahyazdāta the second false Bardiya in Persis, Araxa in Babylon, Frāda in Margiana, and more, some crushed by Darius in person, some by his generals and his father Hystaspes. The inscription lists nine rebel "kings" and counts nineteen battles in all; five times the king insists he did it in one and the same year. That boast, long doubted, is in fact defensible: if the killing of Gaumāta is set aside, the run of victories from the first defeat of the Babylonians in December 522 to the overthrow of Frāda a year later did fall within Darius's accession year, which happened to carry an intercalary month. A short postscript, added afterward in the fifth Old Persian column alone, records two further campaigns of the second and third years, against the Elamites under Atamaita and the Scythians under Skunkha.

The Truth and the Lie

The organising idea of the whole monument is the war of the truth against the drauga, the Lie. Every rebel is a liar; rebellion itself is falsehood made into war; and the king holds the throne because he keeps faith with arta, the right order of things, under the hand of Ahura Mazdā. Darius says it in his own defence:

"Ahuramazda brought me help, because I was not wicked, nor was I a liar, nor was I a despot; I have ruled according to righteousness." — Darius I, the Behistun inscription (DB §63)^[1]

And he presses the lesson on those who come after, first as a warning, then as a plea to believe him:

"Thou who shalt be king hereafter: guard yourself vigorously against the Lie." — Darius I, the Behistun inscription (col. IV)^[1]

"Thou who shalt behold this inscription hereafter, let it not seem false to thee; believe it to be the truth." — Darius I, the Behistun inscription (col. IV)^[1]

That last sentence is the whole source-critical problem in a single line. The king who insists his record is true is the same king whose victory made him the only survivor able to tell the tale; whose truth we are reading is exactly the question the entry must weigh (see the evaluation below, and religion and the Lie).

The res gestae as literature

Behistun is a document, but also a made thing, a work of imperial art. Its acknowledged models are the Assyrian Royal Annals, above all those of Assurbanipal, which likewise recount a king's deeds; yet its repetitive, formulaic rhythm, the recurring "Says Darius the King" and the drum-roll of the god's favour, owes something to the models of oral poetry. The construction is subtler than it first seems: each paragraph is framed as the king's direct speech, introduced as a quotation, so that the text as a whole reads as if a narrator were relaying the royal voice. The Old Persian version, the one Darius held to be standard, is terse and lapidary, its language plain and unbombastic, its sentences sometimes awkward but weighed with evident care. It was, in the fullest sense, published: the king appeals repeatedly to future readers to keep the monument in repair and to spread its account abroad.

The copies across the empire

Darius did not leave his history on one unreachable cliff. The final paragraph states that he sent copies and translations of the text throughout the provinces, and the ground has borne this out. Two small fragments of a Babylonian version have been found at Babylon itself, showing the whole inscription was made public there. Far more striking are the remains of an Aramaic translation on papyrus from the Jewish military colony at Elephantine (Jeb) in Egypt: two sheets and dozens of battered fragments in large, handsome letters, not one line of them complete, dating from as late as about 420 BCE, in the reign of Darius II. By the reckoning of Greenfield and Porten, some 79 lines survive, in part, of an original scroll of about 190 lines over eleven columns.^[2] That an official Aramaic rendering of the founder's res gestae was still being copied and read aloud in a garrison town on the Nile, four generations after the events, shows how the inscription served the empire as its authorised history, carried in the chancery's own lingua franca to peoples who would never see the rock. Curiously, the Aramaic copy even folds in a passage from the address to posterity on Darius's tomb (DNb), grafting one royal text onto another.

The decipherment: the Rosetta Stone of cuneiform

Behistun's second life began in the 1830s and 40s, when the young British officer Henry Creswick Rawlinson had himself let down the cliff on ropes to copy the inscription, returning across more than a decade to complete the perilous work. He edited the Old Persian and Babylonian versions himself and handed his squeezes of the Elamite to Edwin Norris. Because Behistun repeated one text in three scripts of graduated difficulty, and because the readable Old Persian could be broken into first by the method Georg Friedrich Grotefend had pioneered on shorter royal inscriptions, it did for Mesopotamia what the Rosetta Stone did for Egypt: it gave scholars a bilingual key. The Old Persian yielded first because it is by far the simplest of the three: a near-alphabetic syllabary of only some three dozen signs, invented for the royal inscriptions, against the several hundred logographic and syllabic signs of the Elamite and Babylonian systems. Working from proper names shared across the versions, the kings' names being the fixed points, the decipherers moved outward from the known to the unknown. From the Old Persian, worked out first, Assyriologists moved to the Elamite and then to the far harder Babylonian, and so opened the entire written record of Assyria and Babylonia. It is not an exaggeration to call this inscription, as scholars do, the most important single document of the ancient Near East, and the founding text of cuneiform studies. Its very survival was a matter of luck as much as of the king's foresight: erosion, seepage and drifting sand have damaged all three versions, especially the Babylonian, and in the last century soldiers on the road below used the carved figures for target practice.

Why it matters here

For this compendium, Behistun is the ground beneath a great deal else. It is the earliest and fullest statement of Achaemenid royal ideology, the source of the province-list and the dynastic claim, the charter of the arta-versus-Lie theology that runs through the reign, and the origin of the Old Persian script itself. It is also the model case of a source that must be read against its own grain: authoritative because it is contemporary and the king's own, treacherous for exactly the same reason. Everything the entries on the accession of Darius, on arta and the Lie, and on the kingship draws from it must be held to that double standard.