On a limestone cliff face 1,200 metres above the ancient Royal Road between Babylon and Ecbatana, Darius I of Persia commissioned what would become the most consequential inscription in the history of writing: a trilingual cuneiform text recording his suppression of nine simultaneous revolts in 521-520 BCE, carved in Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian. The Bisotun Monument (Behistun Inscription), inscribed by UNESCO in 2006, is the largest rock relief of antiquity and the text that — 2,300 years after it was carved — unlocked the ability to read Mesopotamian cuneiform, opening three millennia of Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian civilisation to modern scholarship.
The monument: Darius, the nine kings, and the trilingual inscription 30 km east of Kermanshah, Kermanshah Province, Iran
The context for the inscription is a political crisis of remarkable intensity. Darius I was not the obvious heir to the Achaemenid throne. When Cambyses II died in 522 BCE while returning from his Egyptian campaign, a man claiming to be Cambyses’s brother Smerdis (Bardiya) seized power. Darius — a member of a collateral branch of the royal family and commander of the imperial guard — killed this claimant (whom Darius’s inscription calls Gaumata the Magian, arguing that the real Smerdis had been secretly killed by Cambyses earlier) and took the throne. The assassination of a sitting king, even a putative usurper, immediately triggered revolts across the empire: Babylon twice, Elam, Media, Parthia, Margiana, Sattagydian territories, Armenia, and Egypt — nine major rebellions within the first year and a half of Darius’s reign, requiring simultaneous military campaigns across a territory stretching from Egypt to Central Asia.
The Bisotun relief and inscription were designed to make the official case for Darius’s legitimacy and to document his victory over the rebels. The relief occupies a panel approximately 3 metres high and 5.5 metres wide, carved into the cliff at a point that would have been clearly visible to travellers on the Royal Road below. Darius is shown at life-size, his left foot on the chest of a prostrate figure identified as Gaumata. Behind Darius stand two Persian nobles (his bow-bearer and his lance-bearer). Before him, nine captured rebel kings are shown bound with rope passed through their necks, each identified by inscription with his name and the territory he claimed. Above the entire scene, the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda hovers in his winged disc form, conferring divine sanction on Darius’s kingship.
The inscription surrounding the relief is the longest known Old Persian text in existence: 519 lines of cuneiform text, with corresponding versions in Elamite (longer, as Elamite requires more space to express equivalent content) and Babylonian/Akkadian. The Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian versions are not exact translations — they differ in some details and emphasis — but they tell the same story: Ahura Mazda gave Darius the kingdom; a liar (Gaumata) deceived the people; Darius killed him with the god’s help; nine rebel kings rose and were defeated; Darius distributed justice. The repetitive structure is intentional — it is a proclamation designed to be read aloud by officials throughout the empire, not a literary text meant for close reading.
The physical inaccessibility of the inscription (the lower panels were plastered and the access route modified after completion, to prevent anyone from erasing or adding to the text) meant that the Bisotun relief was known to travellers for millennia but unreadable. The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus mentioned it; Sassanid-era reliefs were added nearby, confirming continuous awareness of the site. But the cuneiform writing itself was a dead script — no one in the medieval or early modern world could read it.
Henry Rawlinson and the decipherment of cuneiform The wider Bisotun complex
The story of Bisotun’s role in the decipherment of cuneiform is one of the more dramatic episodes in the history of scholarship, involving a British Army officer, extreme physical risk, and an insight that proved more productive than the Rosetta Stone. Henry Creswicke Rawlinson was stationed at Kermanshah as a military adviser to the Persian Army in 1835 when he first examined the Bisotun cliff. He recognised that the three parallel texts must contain the same content in three different scripts and languages — the same logic that made the Rosetta Stone (deciphered by Champollion in 1822) valuable for Egyptian hieroglyphics — and that if any of the three languages could be read, it might serve as a key to the others.
Old Persian was the most tractable. European scholars had been working on it since the late 18th century, using other Achaemenid inscriptions where proper names (Darius, Xerxes, Hystaspes) provided a foothold; by Rawlinson’s time, about half the Old Persian signs had been tentatively identified. Rawlinson copied the accessible lower panels of the Old Persian column by hanging from ropes on the cliff face and making paper squeezes (impressions in damp paper pressed against the carved surface). He published a preliminary correct reading of the Old Persian text in 1838, identifying it as a proclamation by Darius I. The Babylonian text was far more difficult to reach — it occupied a panel to the left of the main relief, accessible only from a narrow ledge. According to Rawlinson’s own account, he worked there “as Sinbad the Sailor might have done,” sometimes standing on a ladder balanced on an assistant’s shoulders while pressing paper against the cliff. He completed his copies by 1847 and published the Babylonian decipherment in 1851. The Babylonian text, once read, proved to be the key to the entire cuneiform family: Old Persian cuneiform had only 36 signs (a syllabary), while Babylonian cuneiform had hundreds, but they shared the same underlying consonantal roots in Semitic vocabulary that allowed systematic identification of signs. From Bisotun’s Babylonian text, scholars could work outward to Assyrian, Akkadian, and eventually Sumerian — a body of written civilisation spanning more than 3,000 years that had been completely illegible for 1,500 years before Rawlinson’s work at Bisotun.
The broader Bisotun complex contains several other significant monuments from different periods. A relief of Hercules (Heracles), carved in 148 BCE in the Hellenistic Seleucid style, shows the god reclining with a wine cup — an image strikingly different from the Achaemenid reliefs nearby and reflecting the Greek cultural influence that followed Alexander’s conquest. A Parthian-era relief from the 1st century CE commemorates the Parthian king Gotarzes II. A Median-era relief predates Darius’s work and attests to the site’s sacred status before the Achaemenids. A Sassanid-era caravanserai (reutilised and expanded in the Safavid period) stands at the base of the cliff, still substantially intact, and recalls the millennia during which Bisotun was a significant waystation on the trans-Iranian road.
Practical information
Bisotun is located 30 km east of Kermanshah city on the main highway toward Hamadan (the ancient Ecbatana). The site is easily reached by private car or taxi from Kermanshah; shared taxis (savari) for the route toward Hamadan stop at Bisotun village on request. The main viewpoint for the relief and inscription is accessed from a visitor area at the cliff’s base; the relief itself is approximately 100 metres above the road level, so binoculars or a telephoto lens are helpful for examining the carved figures and inscription columns in detail. A new interpretation centre near the base of the cliff provides context in Farsi and, to a limited extent, in English. Entry requires a ticket (approximately IRR 150,000-300,000 for international visitors at 2024 rates, subject to currency fluctuations given Iran’s exchange rate situation). The site is open daily; early morning or late afternoon visits avoid the midday heat in summer and provide better light on the cliff face for photography. The larger Kermanshah region has a full range of hotels; the city is known for its cuisine, particularly the lamb-based Ghormeh sabzi preparations, and the Taq-e Bostan rock reliefs (Sassanid-era, within the city) complement a visit to Bisotun well. Foreign visitors to Iran require a visa obtained through the Iranian consulate or, for some nationalities, on arrival at major airports (UK, US, and Canadian citizens face additional restrictions). Travel should be planned with current conditions in mind, and travel insurance verified for coverage in Iran.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Bisotun described as the key to deciphering cuneiform — more significant than the Rosetta Stone?
The comparison requires some precision. The Rosetta Stone (1799, deciphered 1822) unlocked Egyptian hieroglyphics by providing the same text in three scripts, one of which (Greek) was already legible to European scholars. Bisotun performed an equivalent function for cuneiform, but the stakes were larger: where hieroglyphics had been in use from approximately 3200 BCE to around 400 CE (a span of about 3,600 years), Mesopotamian cuneiform had been in use from approximately 3400 BCE to the first centuries CE, spanning even longer, and it was the writing system of the Sumerians (who invented writing), the Akkadians, the Babylonians, and the Assyrians — the civilisations that produced the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Code of Hammurabi, the astronomical records of Babylon, and the royal annals of Nineveh. All of this was completely inaccessible before cuneiform was cracked. The reason Bisotun was more productive than the Rosetta Stone, strictly speaking, is that its Babylonian text was longer (providing more material for pattern analysis) and because Babylonian cuneiform is the ancestor or close relative of all the major cuneiform variants. Once Babylonian was read, Assyrian, Akkadian, and with more difficulty Sumerian (an unrelated language that was written in borrowed cuneiform signs) could all be approached. The Rosetta Stone gave scholars Egyptian; Bisotun ultimately gave scholars the entire cuneiform family. Henry Rawlinson was clear about this in his own publications, as was the contemporary Assyriologist Edward Hincks who worked on the decipherment in parallel from other inscriptions. The scientific priority is shared across several scholars, but Bisotun’s trilingual text is the foundation on which the entire edifice of Assyriology rests.
Who was Darius I, and is the Bisotun account of his rise to power accurate?
Darius I (r. 522-486 BCE) is one of the most consequential rulers in Persian history — the king who consolidated and codified the Achaemenid Empire’s administrative system, built Persepolis as the ceremonial capital, instituted the royal road network with its famous postal relay system, completed the conquest of northwestern India (the Indus valley region), and launched the first Persian invasion of Greece (ended at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE). His reign lasted 36 years and the empire he organised remained the framework within which his successors operated for the next two centuries. Whether the Bisotun account of his accession is accurate is a question historians have debated since the inscription was deciphered. The account Darius gives is that a magian (Zoroastrian priest) named Gaumata impersonated the dead prince Smerdis (Bardiya), claiming the throne; Darius, recognising the fraud, killed Gaumata with the help of six co-conspirators (all named in the inscription) and then won the subsequent revolts by divine favour. The obvious problem is that this story comes exclusively from Darius himself, the man who benefited from the killing. The Greek historian Herodotus (writing roughly 60 years later) tells the same story, but Herodotus relied partly on Persian informants who were themselves working within the official narrative. Some modern historians have proposed that Darius killed the real Smerdis (Bardiya), not an impostor, and that the “magian Gaumata” story was constructed post-hoc to legitimise a coup. This reading cannot be verified from the available evidence; the Bisotun inscription is simultaneously the primary evidence for the period and the document most directly interested in promoting Darius’s version of events.
What other monuments are in the wider Bisotun archaeological complex?
The Bisotun UNESCO inscription covers not just the Darius relief and cuneiform text but the entire archaeological complex on and around the cliff, which documents human activity at this strategically important mountain pass over several thousand years. The earliest significant monument is a Median-era relief, predating Darius’s work and attesting to the site’s significance in the pre-Achaemenid period. Darius’s own complex includes not just the main relief and inscription but a relief of Darius himself that was later modified (an additional rebel king figure was added after the initial carving was completed). The Seleucid-era Hercules relief (148 BCE) is immediately below the Achaemenid complex; it shows Heracles reclining and drinking, carved in a thoroughly Hellenistic style, and serves as a reminder that the conquests of Alexander the Great replaced Persian imperial culture with Macedonian Greek culture throughout the region. A Parthian-era panel (1st century CE, commemorating Gotarzes II) follows the Seleucid relief, reflecting the succession of empires that controlled the Kermanshah corridor. The Sassanid caravanserai at the cliff’s base, substantially rebuilt in the Safavid period (16th-17th century CE), recalls Bisotun’s continuing practical importance as a waystation on the major east-west trade and military route across Iran — the road that had been, in the Achaemenid period, the Royal Road connecting Babylon to Ecbatana and beyond. Together, these monuments make Bisotun something rarer than a single-period site: a palimpsest of imperial history, where successive rulers used the same cliff to assert their presence over the same strategic pass for more than 2,500 years.
