Behistun Inscription

Darius, King of Kings, was responsible for a huge trilingual inscription placed up high on a rocky outcropping. He ordered this carved 2,500 years ago, and the letters are still legible. The problem was that until the 19th century, they were legible but unreadable. Of course, when he had them carved, people could read them and although his choice of languages now seems obscure, at the time using Babylonian, Old Persian, and Elamite made great sense. And having three versions of the same next not only communicated his message to a wide audience back then but, fortuitously, made it possible to reconstruct these languages a hundred a fifty years ago.

I first read about this inscription, and the adventure of their modern study, in the early 1990s when I had little else to do many evenings in Madurai but browse the Britannica. An Englishman adventurer got a young Kurdish boy to climb up the rocks and make a copy, a rubbing I believe, of the inscription.

Last year, I downloaded a version of the Old Persian inscription, but in romanized transcription, and read the text from the first two columns. This year, I succeeded in reading the entire inscription. It's just about 3,000 words long and because of the constant repetition, there are only about 350 different words in the entire thing. Much of it runs thus: "Darius says, 'I am a king'...'and he revolted and told lies to the people and they went to him'...'and I with the aid of Ahuramazda I thoroughly smote him'.

But, just as with religious texts, this repetition, no matter how boring when read in a language one knows well, is very useful for those who are still just learning. I've read about Darius's ancestry, the rebellions against him, his devotion to God, the way he cut the tongues from rebel leaders and then crucified them.

Henry Rawlinson's birthday is April 11, so I've decided in my Annual Chrestomathy to devote April 11 to re-reading this text.