کتیبه بیستون — سنگ روزتای ایران
The Behistun (Bisotun) Inscription is carved into a polished limestone cliff 100 meters above the road from Babylon to Ecbatana in present-day Kermanshah Province, Iran. Commissioned by Darius I around 520 BC, it records in three languages (Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian cuneiform) how Darius overcame pretenders to the throne after Cambyses II's death.
The inscription's trilingual format made it the Persian equivalent of the Rosetta Stone. When Henry Rawlinson, a British army officer, painstakingly copied and deciphered it between 1835 and 1847, he cracked the code of cuneiform script — unlocking the ability to read thousands of ancient Mesopotamian texts.
The inscription records: 'I am Darius, the Great King, King of Kings, King of Persia, King of countries, son of Hystaspes, grandson of Arsames, an Achaemenid.' It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and remains the most important historical inscription in Iranian and Mesopotamian archaeology.
The Behistun Inscription is written in three cuneiform scripts (Old Persian, Elamite, Babylonian). Its decipherment in the 1840s unlocked cuneiform writing entirely, allowing scholars to read thousands of ancient Mesopotamian texts.
The Behistun Inscription is carved 100 meters up a cliff face near the modern city of Bisotun (Behistun) in Kermanshah Province, western Iran. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.