Inscriptions of Darius the Great

Darius I, known as Darius the Great, ruled the Persian Achaemenid Empire from 522 to 486 BCE. Sometime after taking the throne, he had a monumental relief sculpture carved on the face of a cliff on Mount Behistûn above the royal road that ran to his capital. The inscriptions on this sculpture were written in Old Persian, Elamite (which is called “Susian” in this translation), and Babylonian, and it used cuneiform as a phonetic (representing sounds) script rather than in the logographic (representing words) manner. While Old Persian could be deciphered by its relationship to the language of the Avesta and to later languages including modern Persian, the Elamite and Babylonian languages were lost until this inscription was discovered. This use of cuneiform as an alphabet made it possible to decipher these previously-lost languages, just like the parallel Egyptian hieroglyphic/Greek alphabetic transcriptions on the famous Rosetta Stone made it possible for scholars to understand the Egyptian language and hieroglyphic system.

Although this inscription claims that Darius was descended from the first rulers of the Achaemenid dynasty of Persia and became emperor by defeating the usurper Gaumata, it is likely that he was only distantly related to the previous Archaemenid kings. Other Persian and Greek sources relate different and conflicting stories of how Darius became king. The existence of this elaborate monument, together with other buildings and inscriptions that underscore Darisus's power, together with Darius's almost constant warfare against rebels and usurpers in the first part of his reign indicate that he gained and held the Persian empire primarily by force.

Link to the source: Inscriptions of Darius the Great