ArtaA Compendium of the Achaemenid World
Source 520 BCE – 518 BCE

The Behistun Inscription (DB)

also: Behistun · Bisitun · Bisotun · Bagastāna · DB

Darius I's monumental cliff-relief and trilingual inscription recounting his seizure and defence of the throne against Gaumāta and a wave of rebels; the single most important primary source for the reign, and the key that deciphered cuneiform.

High on the limestone cliff of Bagastāna ('place of the gods', modern Bisotun) above the road from Babylon to Ecbatana, Darius had carved a great relief and a long inscription in three languages and scripts — Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian. The relief shows Darius, bow in hand and foot on the fallen Gaumāta, facing a line of nine bound and roped rebel 'kings', beneath the winged figure of divine sanction. The text, in the king's own first-person voice, narrates the crisis of 522–520: the death of Cambyses, the seizure of the throne by the Magus Gaumāta impersonating the dead Bardiya, Darius's killing of the usurper 'with the help of Ahuramazda', and the storm of some nineteen battles by which he put down the rebellions that broke out across Elam, Babylon, Media, Persis, and the east. Its organising theme is the war of the Truth against the Lie: every rival is a liar, and Ahuramazda gives the kingdom to the king who is not a lie-follower.

Behistun is also the Rosetta Stone of cuneiform: it was Henry Rawlinson's copying and decipherment of the Old Persian text in the 1830s–40s, checked against the other two versions, that cracked the Mesopotamian scripts and opened the entire written record of the ancient Near East.

Evaluation of the source

Behistun is at once indispensable and treacherous. Indispensable: it is the only long, contemporary, first-person Achaemenid narrative of political events, composed within two years of them and publicly displayed. Treacherous: it is pure royal apologia, written by the victor to justify a violent and contested accession. Its central claim — that the man Darius killed was an impostor magus and not the true Bardiya son of Cyrus — cannot be independently confirmed, and a strand of modern scholarship suspects the reverse: that Darius was the usurper and the 'Lie' framing his masterstroke. The battle-count and casualty figures are the king's own. It should be read as the most authoritative statement of how Darius wished the events to be understood, not as neutral chronicle. Copies in Aramaic (found at Elephantine) and Babylonian show the text was circulated across the empire as official history.

Images & material

image not hosted (licence) — see source ↗
The Behistun relief and inscription on the cliff at Bisotun, Kermanshah, Iran. Photograph via Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA (verify exact file + attribution before embedding) source ↗

References

Citation tiers: primary verifiable primary evidence · secondary a specific verified modern reference · consensus (flagged) a represented scholarly position, honestly flagged, not a fabricated citation.

  1. primary DB (the Behistun inscription), Old Persian text; ed. Kent, Old Persian (1953); Schmitt, Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum
  2. primary The Aramaic version of DB among the Elephantine papyri (Cowley 1923)
  3. primary Herodotus 3.61–79 — the Greek tradition of Gaumāta and the accession, to compare
  4. consensus (flagged) On Rawlinson's decipherment and on the 'Darius as usurper' minority reading — upgrade with specific references when the works are fetched + checked

Cite this entry

“The Behistun Inscription (DB)”, in Arta: A Compendium of the Achaemenid World (entry behistun-inscription), accessed 2026.

Darius I · Arta (Truth, right order) · The Drauga (the Lie) · The Magi · Ahura Mazdā · Herodotus, The Histories · Religion & the Lie: the Achaemenid religious world

Referenced by: Naqsh-e Rostam · The Accession of Darius (522 BCE) · The Winged Symbol (the figure in the winged ring)