Bisotun

Bisotun is a great limestone cliff on the old road from the Iranian plateau down to Mesopotamia, near Kermanshah. High on its face, around 520 BCE, Darius I had carved a relief and a long inscription telling how he came to the throne. The site was inscribed by UNESCO in 2006.

The relief shows Darius, his foot on the chest of a fallen figure identified as Gaumata, the man he called a usurper, while nine rebel kings stand before him roped together at the neck. Above floats the winged symbol of Ahuramazda. Around the scene, the text is written in three languages: Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. It recounts the battles of his first years in power in his own words, and copies of the text were circulated across the empire.

Because the same text appears in three languages, Bisotun became to cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone was to hieroglyphs. In the 1830s and 1840s the British officer Henry Rawlinson climbed the cliff to copy it, and his work was central to the decipherment of Old Persian and Babylonian. The site also holds a Parthian relief, a Hellenistic figure of Hercules reclining with a cup, and a Safavid-era caravanserai at the foot of the cliff.