The Behistun Inscription

On a sheer cliff by the road from Babylon to Ecbatana, some hundred metres up, a relief and inscription are cut at Darius's command: the king receives the submission of nine rebel chiefs. The text is given three times — in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian — and is addressed not to passers-by but to eternity. In the nineteenth century Henry Rawlinson copied the inscription at the risk of his life, and the collation of the three versions yielded the key to cuneiform. Thanks to Behistun the Assyrian and Babylonian archives began to speak — and with them a whole stratum of the history that surrounded ancient Israel.