History

The cliff at Bisotun was already a sacred and strategic location before Darius I commissioned his inscription: the site lies on the principal route between the Babylonian heartland of the Achaemenid Empire and the Iranian plateau, and the cliff’s natural visual dominance over the road below made it ideal for a monument intended to assert royal legitimacy to everyone who passed. Darius had seized the throne in 522 BC in disputed circumstances — Cambyses II, the son of Cyrus the Great, had died on campaign in Egypt, and a claimant presenting himself as Cambyses’ brother Smerdis (whom Cambyses had secretly killed) took power briefly before Darius and six Persian nobles killed him, with Darius then defeating a series of provincial rebellions over the following year. The Bisotun inscription is Darius’s official account of these events, presented in the three principal administrative languages of the empire and positioned approximately 15 metres above ground level — deliberately inaccessible without special equipment — to prevent tampering and to assert permanence.

The inscription remained visible and partially legible in Antiquity: the Greek historian Ctesias mentioned a garden and pool at the base of the cliff, and later Parthian rulers added their own inscriptions to the same rock face. By the medieval period, the cuneiform text was unreadable, and local tradition attributed the carved panel to a supernatural or mythological origin. When Henry Rawlinson, a British officer serving as political adviser to the Persian governor of Kermanshah, began systematic study of the inscription in 1835, he worked with rope and plank platforms to copy the Old Persian text — the portion closest to the ground. The Elamite text, on a higher ledge, required still more dangerous access; a local Kurdish boy was used to reach the most inaccessible sections of the Babylonian text by driving wooden pegs into crevices. Rawlinson published his decipherment of Old Persian cuneiform in 1847 and the critical Babylonian results in 1851, the same year that Edward Hincks and Julius Oppert independently confirmed and extended his conclusions.

The consequence was the opening of an entire civilisational archive: within a generation, the administrative records of the Neo-Babylonian and Assyrian empires, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the creation myth Enuma Elish, and thousands of legal, commercial, and religious documents became readable. The Bisotun inscription was not merely important in itself; it was the key that unlocked everything else.