Behistun Inscription
A monumental trilingual inscription carved into a cliff face at Bisotun (Behistun) in the Zagros Mountains of modern Iran, commissioned by Darius I (the Great) of Persia. It records Darius's accession to the throne, his defeat of the pretender Gaumata, and his suppression of nineteen rebellions. The Babylonian version was central to the decipherment of cuneiform. The inscription provides essential historical context for the Persian period described in Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Haggai, Zechariah, and Daniel.
Translation: Scholarly paraphrase based on Herbert Cushing Tolman, The Behistan Inscription of King Darius (1908, Public Domain) and L.W. King and R.C. Thompson, The Sculptures and Inscription of Darius the Great on the Rock of Behistûn (1907, Public Domain) (Public Domain)
Overview
A massive trilingual royal inscription carved into a cliff face at Behistun (modern Bisotun) in western Iran by Persian King Darius I around 522-520 BCE, written in Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian cuneiform. Called the Rosetta Stone of cuneiform, it was the key that unlocked the decipherment of cuneiform writing in the 19th century and thereby opened the entire corpus of ancient Near Eastern literature to modern scholarship. For biblical studies, it provides essential historical and theological context for the Persian imperial period that forms the backdrop of Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Daniel, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.
- Ezra 1-6 (Persian decrees for Temple rebuilding under Darius I)
- Nehemiah 2 (Persian administrative authority over Judah)
- Esther 1-3 (multilingual imperial decrees and Persian court procedures)
- Daniel 3-6 (theology of divine kingship, peoples and languages of the empire)
- Haggai 2:10 (prophecy in the second year of Darius)
- Zechariah 1:1 (prophecy in the second year of Darius)
Henry Rawlinson, a British army officer and intelligence agent, made his first copies of the Behistun Inscription in 1835 by hanging from a rope 100 meters above the ground. He nearly fell to his death multiple times. His successful decipherment of the text by 1846 opened the door to reading all cuneiform texts, enabling the discovery of the Gilgamesh flood narrative, the Enuma Elish, and thousands of other ancient texts.