The Behistun inscription
A cliff-face boast in three languages becomes the key to cuneiform.
- When
- Known to
- ± 5 years
- Era
- Iron Age, Holocene
Darius has his account of seizing the throne carved 100 metres up a cliff in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian, deliberately out of reach. In the 1830s and 40s Henry Rawlinson had himself lowered on ropes to copy it, and the trilingual text did for cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone did for hieroglyphs — opening three thousand years of Mesopotamian writing that had been unreadable since antiquity.