For the next few weeks Rawlinson applied himself to his cuneiform studies, looking first at the Elwand inscriptions, but he soon realized that, with only these short inscriptions to work on, he was unlikely to make much progress. He therefore made the decision to try to copy the trilingual inscription at Bisitun.
The imposing appearance of Bisitun greatly impressed Rawlinson, who considered it ‘a very remarkable natural object on the high road between Ecbatana and Babylon … The rock, or, as it is usually called by the Arab geographers, the mountain of Behistun, is not an isolated hill, as has sometimes been imagined. It is merely the terminal point of a long, narrow range which bounds the plain of Kermanshah to the eastward. This range is rocky and abrupt throughout, but at the extremity it rises in height, and becomes a sheer precipice.’1 It is, in fact, the end of a ridge of peaks of the Zagros mountain range, where the limestone rock rises dramatically to a height of 1,700 feet above the plain, with the inscription of Darius the Great carved at a height of over 200 feet. The monument appears small in relation to the mountain, yet it is over 25 feet tall and 70 feet wide, and the panel of relief sculptures alone is nearly 18 feet wide and 10 feet high.
The massive monument was made as an extensive inscription surrounding relief sculptures of Darius and his defeated prisoners. Although the inscription was trilingual (written in three scripts and three languages) it was not originally designed as such. The inscriptions Rawlinson had already seen at Persepolis were intended to be trilingual from the outset, as was the Rosetta Stone in Egypt with its three different scripts (although technically bilingual, with just two languages), whereas the Bisitun monument evolved gradually. The monument did not overlook the plain, but was carved on the south-facing wall of a cleft in the mountain. A natural pathway originally led to the spot chosen by Darius, and once the rock surface was cut back and dressed smooth with iron chisels, the work of carving and engraving could begin.
At first, Darius intended the relief sculpture as the centrepiece, with inscriptions placed symmetrically round the figures. For the inscriptions, the rock face was lightly engraved with guidelines about 1½ inches (possibly two fingers’ width) apart. The sculptured panel was started early in 520 BC, and four columns of Elamite cuneiform inscription, a total of 323 lines, were added to the right. Because Rawlinson did not know the origins of this type of cuneiform, he used the term ‘Median’, after the Medes who once inhabited this area, as well as ‘Scythic’, thinking it may have originated with the Scythic tribe of the Russian steppes. ‘Susian’ replaced these terms, after the city of Susa that Rawlinson had recently visited. Finally, ‘Elamite’ was introduced after the earliest known name for the region, and that term is still used today.
In 519 BC, only months after the carving of the relief sculpture and Elamite inscription, a Babylonian inscription was added to the left, on an overhanging rock face. It was carved in a single column nearly 14 feet high and consisted of 112 lines of cuneiform, some of which are themselves over 13 feet long: the engraver clearly misjudged this task, as it should have been split into two columns. Later that same year the Old Persian inscription was added, in four columns of cuneiform, totalling 378 lines, which were engraved immediately below the relief sculpture, although the fourth column extended beneath the Elamite inscription, perhaps where the engraver misjudged his calculations in laying out the text. Although this was a translation of the Elamite text, minor changes and omissions were made, and an additional paragraph was incorporated towards the end, which related how the Old Persian cuneiform was a new form of writing, that this was the first time it had ever been used, and how copies and translations of the Bisitun text were being circulated throughout the Persian Empire. No room was available to add this extra paragraph to the main body of the Elamite inscription, but instead it appeared as a detached inscription above the relief sculptures. It was never added to the Babylonian, even though there was room.
Another figure of a defeated rebel, Skunkha, was added to the relief sculptures in 518 BC, necessitating the obliteration of part of the first column of the Elamite text. Incredibly, Darius ordered a copy of the entire Elamite inscription to be meticulously carved to the left of the Old Persian inscription, below the Babylonian, this time as three columns totalling 260 lines. At the same time a short fifth column giving an account of his new military victories was added to the end of the Old Persian, and the rock surface with the first Elamite inscription was smoothed so that it was barely visible.
Once all the inscriptions were finished, the monument was made as inaccessible as possible, including quarrying away the mountain path, to reduce the risk of vandalism. From the plain below, the inscriptions were too far away to be read, and through succeeding generations the meaning of the monument was lost. In ancient Greek times it became known as Bagistanon, ‘a place of the gods’, which gave rise to its Persian name of Bisitun (or Bisotun or Behistun), meaning literally ‘without columns’.
Early European travellers noticed the site, but did not understand it. Over a decade before Rawlinson arrived at Kermanshah, the artist and traveller Robert Ker Porter made the first recorded ascent, though seemingly not to the actual ledge below the inscriptions: ‘I could not resist the impulse to examine it nearer … To approach it at all, was a business of difficulty and danger; however, after much scrambling and climbing, I at last got pretty far up the rock, and finding a ledge, placed myself on it as firmly as I could.’2 He was initially interested in the relief sculptures, not the inscriptions beneath, commenting: ‘but still I was farther from the object of all this peril, than I had hoped; yet my eyes being tolerably long-sighted, and my glass [telescope] more so, I managed to copy the whole sculpture.’3 Porter’s drawing was reasonably accurate, and he also made notes about the inscriptions beneath the sculptures: ‘the excavation is continued to a considerable extent, containing eight deep closely written columns [the Elamite and Old Persian] in the same character. From so much labour having been exerted on this part of the work, it excites more regret that so little progress has yet been made towards deciphering the character; and most devoutly must we hope that the indefatigable scholars now engaged in the study of these apparently oldest letters in the world may at last succeed in bringing them to an intelligible language. In that case what a treasure-house of historical knowledge would be unfolded here.’4
To copy the inscriptions at Bisitun would be, Porter believed, an enormous undertaking: ‘to transcribe the whole of the tablets, could I have drawn myself up sufficiently high on the rock to be within sight of them, would have occupied me more than a month. At no time can it ever be attempted without great personal risk; yet I do not doubt that some bracket on the surface might be found, to admit a tolerably secure seat for some future traveller, who has ardour and time, to accomplish so desirable a purpose.’5
In the early summer of 1836, Rawlinson used every spare minute to make repeated climbs up to the narrow ledge below the inscriptions and copy the initial lines of the first column of the Old Persian. He had deduced that there were three different types of cuneiform, as on the Elwand inscriptions, and he chose to start with the Old Persian script that appeared the most simple. Nobody had ever before managed to climb right up to these inscriptions, let alone record them, and even four years later the artist Eugène Flandin found the task virtually impossible. He and an architect, Pascal Coste, had been instructed by the French government to copy