Bisotun (Behistun)

Mount Bisotun lies in the Zagros, about 30 km east of Kermanshah, on the ancient road linking Mesopotamia to the Iranian plateau and Hamadan (Ecbatana), later called the Great Khorasan Road. Its springs and the plain below made it a stop for caravans and armies from the earliest times.

Its Old Persian name is usually reconstructed as *bagastāna, “place of the gods”; Diodorus of Sicily calls it Bagistanon. Medieval geographers wrote Behestūn (as if “with good columns”); the modern Bisotun (as if “without columns”) is a popular transformation of it (Schmitt, Iranica).

The earliest human traces at Bisotun are Palaeolithic finds from a cave by the spring, excavated by Carleton Coon in 1949. Its stone tools are classed as Mousterian (Middle Palaeolithic), and later studies attribute a human bone from it to a Neanderthal (this attribution should be checked against specialist literature). Then come traces of a second-millennium BCE settlement and a so-called “Median fortress”, which some identify with Sikayauvatish, where Darius killed Gaumata.

After crushing the revolts of 522–521 BCE, Darius the Great carved a relief on a high, inaccessible cliff above the road: he stands with his foot on Gaumata the Magian, nine bound “lying kings” stand roped before him, two attendants stand behind him, and a winged figure, usually identified as Ahuramazda (the identification is debated), hovers above. A tenth figure, Skunkha the Scythian in a pointed cap, was added later.

The text is trilingual: Elamite, Babylonian (Akkadian) and Old Persian. The order of carving and the relocation of the Elamite text show the monument was made in several stages. The fifth Old Persian column, on the second and third regnal years, is a later addition. The relief itself is about 3 m high and 5.5 m long, carved about 66 m above the springs on the plain (Schmitt, Iranica). According to Luschey the Elamite text is the oldest, and the Old Persian script was introduced only after the relief was finished, c. 520 BCE. A copy of the relief itself stood at Babylon.

Behistun is Iran’s first long “statement of legitimacy”. Darius grounds his right in lineage, in Ahuramazda’s favour and in the fight against “the Lie”. From the standpoint of liberty, what matters is that the king felt he had to argue his case to his subjects and put it on record; but the account is one-sided, and the rebels’ voices are absent.

We do not reproduce the full text, since modern translations are under copyright. The translation of L. W. King and R. C. Thompson (1907) is in the public domain and is linked in the bibliography. Summary, by Old Persian section numbers (DB):

§§1–9: Darius introduces himself, traces his Achaemenid lineage to Achaemenes, and names twenty-three subject lands.

§§10–15: Cambyses secretly kills his brother Bardiya; Gaumata the Magian claims to be Bardiya and seizes the kingship; Darius and his companions kill him in 522 BCE, and Darius restores to the people what Gaumata had taken.

§§16–57: successive revolts in Elam, Babylon, Media, Persia, Armenia, Margiana and elsewhere, and the battles of Darius’s generals, each with place and day.

§§58–70: Darius swears he has told the truth, warns future kings against the Lie and injustice, speaks of preserving the relief and text, and names his six helpers. §70 (in the Elamite version) speaks of writing the text “in Aryan” and sending copies throughout the lands.

§§71–76 (column V): later campaigns against Elam and the Scythians with pointed caps.

In §14 Darius says he restored the kingship taken from his family, rebuilt the sanctuaries Gaumata had destroyed, and gave back to the people the pastures, herds, household servants and houses that Gaumata had seized (summary after Kent 1953). The exact sense of some words, especially the one rendered “household servants”, is debated.

This section is remarkable: Iran’s oldest long royal text counts the restitution of seized property among the grounds of a king’s legitimacy, treating confiscation as “the Lie” and restitution as “truth”. But it should not be read as property rights in the modern sense: the restorer is the king himself, and the right flows from his hand, not from a law that binds him too. The listing of “servants” is a reminder that a person could be another’s property.

For Iranians today, §14 is a live question: is the security of property a ruler’s favour or a citizen’s right? Behistun shows the question was carved in stone 2,500 years ago.

Darius said he sent copies throughout the lands, and archaeology confirms it: fragments of a stone stele with the Babylonian text were found at Babylon, and an Aramaic version on papyrus, copied under Darius II (late fifth century BCE), was found at Elephantine in Egypt. The text was read not only on the cliff but in distant offices and garrisons.

Georg Friedrich Grotefend took the first steps in reading Old Persian in 1802, from Persepolis inscriptions. Henry Rawlinson, a British officer, copied the Behistun texts between 1835 and 1847, climbing the cliff and at times hanging from ropes; his Old Persian translation appeared in 1846–47. The Old Persian unlocked the Babylonian; and in 1857 a test in which Rawlinson, Edward Hincks, Jules Oppert and Henry Fox Talbot independently translated the same Akkadian text showed Akkadian cuneiform had been deciphered. Hence Behistun is called the Rosetta Stone of Mesopotamia.

A reclining Herakles holding a cup, was found by A. Hakemi in 1959–60 while the main road was being lowered. Its Greek inscription dates it to 148 BCE. Luschey calls it clumsy work but important for its date. An Ionic column base from the Bisotun cemetery may come from a building of Alexander’s time (a conjecture).

Below Darius’s relief are two Parthian reliefs. One shows Mithradates II (c. 124–88 BCE) with four dignitaries or satraps before him; the other horsemen in combat with Nike above and a Greek inscription, usually attributed to Gotarzes II (c. 40–51 CE). A separate “Parthian stone” bears a name read as Vologases. Both are now badly weathered.

In AH 1094 (1684–85 CE) the endowment inscription of Sheikh Ali Khan Zanganeh was cut directly over part of the Mithradates relief, destroying it; earlier European drawings (such as Grelot’s in the seventeenth century) help show what was lost.

From the Sasanian period survive three large capitals with the king and the goddess Anahid (dated by Luschey to Khosrow II, c. 600 CE), the nine piers of Pol-e Khosrow (about 150 m), a retaining wall along the Gamasiab and hundreds of dressed blocks with Sasanian masons’ marks. The largest is Farhad Tarash: a chiselled rock face about 200 m wide and 30 m high, the biggest such work in Iran, from which some 40,000 m³ of rock were removed. Salzmann proposed that a vast ayvan on the scale of Taq-e Kasra was planned there; this is a hypothesis, and the work was left unfinished.

In Persian literature Nizami Ganjavi’s Khosrow and Shirin makes Farhad the mountain-cutter a lover who carves Mount Bisotun for Shirin. The legend turned endless unpaid labour into a symbol of love; history may show an unfinished royal project.

Bisotun remained a caravan stop. The “Old Caravanserai” (about 80 × 80 m), with a mosque in its courtyard, was in Luschey’s view a fortified outpost of the Kurdish prince Hasanuya (10th century CE); an Ilkhanid kiosk by the river dates to Öljeitü. Sheikh Ali Khan Zanganeh, vizier of Shah Soleyman, built the New Caravanserai (known as Shah Abbasi, about 80 × 90 m with four ayvans) and a four-arched bridge in AH 1092–96 (1681–85 CE), and cut an endowment deed into the rock. The details of the endowed property must be read from the inscription itself, which we have not seen.

The waqf was an important civil institution in Iranian history: a private owner permanently devotes the income of property to a public purpose without state management. Yet this deed was cut over an older relief: a charitable act destroyed another heritage.

Bisotun was inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 2006. Restoration scaffolding stood in front of the Darius relief for years and became a symbol of slow conservation. Threats include erosion, water seepage and construction within the protected zone.

Visiting: the site is on the Kermanshah–Hamadan road. The Darius relief is seen from below, best with binoculars; Herakles, the Parthian reliefs, Farhad Tarash and the caravanserai are along the walk at the foot of the mountain. Check opening hours and tickets with official sources before travelling.

Bisotun is a reminder that every age wrote over the stone of those before: king, general, vizier, legendary lover. Keeping these layers is the work of society, not of the state alone.