The Inscription Too High to Steal

High on a limestone cliff in western Iran, roughly 100 meters above the road below, Darius I had his life story carved into the rock: how he claimed the throne, and the rebellions he crushed to keep it.

What makes the Behistun Inscription genuinely remarkable isn't the boasting — kings have always done that — it's that the same text was carved three times, in three different languages and writing systems: Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian cuneiform.

That turned out to be an extraordinary gift to the future. In the 1830s, a British officer named Henry Rawlinson risked his neck dangling from ropes to copy the inscription, and used the parallel texts to help crack cuneiform script — the same way the Rosetta Stone, with its parallel Greek text, had unlocked Egyptian hieroglyphs a few decades earlier.

Darius almost certainly carved it high up specifically so nobody could deface or alter it easily. He probably never imagined that two and a half thousand years later, that same placement would help scholars read Persian and Babylonian history at all — inscription included.