BEHISTUN or BISITUN, a village at the foot of a precipi tous peak some 1,7ooft. high, in the Zangers range in Persia, on the right bank of the Samas-Ab, a tributary of the Kerkha. The original form of the name (Bagistana, "place of the gods," or, "of God") has been preserved by the Greek authors Stephanus of Byzantium, and Diodorus (ii. 13). At the foot of this scarp passes the old road which led from Babylon to Ecbatana, and here it was that Darius I., king of Persia, engraved his great inscription in three kinds of cuneiform writing, in which he recounts the way in which, after the death of Cambyses, he killed the usurper Gaumata (in Justin, Gometes, the pseudo-Smerdis), defeated the numerous rebels, and restored the kingdom of the Achaemenidae. This in scription he carved some 5oof t. above the level of the spring which bubbles out at the foot of the mountain, and, although it is by no means inaccessible, to reach it demands a difficult climb up the precipitous rock-face. The lower part of the inscribed sur face consists of three columns of Susian, and five of Persian, each about 1'ft. high, while above these is the sloping overhang of the Babylonian (over the Susian), and the magnificent sculp ture (over the Persian) of the king putting his foot on the pros trate body of Gaumata, followed by his two ministers. In front of him are nine rebel chiefs with their hands bound behind them and a rope round their necks, and above them is the winged fig ure of the god Auramazda.
In 1835 Henry Rawlinson, then a young officer, turned his at tention to deciphering the Persian cuneiform characters of the in scriptions at Elwend, near Ecbatana, and, unconsciously following the method employed by the German Grotefend at the beginning of the century, he assigned correct values to about a third of the alphabet. With the knowledge thus obtained he attacked the great inscription of Behistun, and by 1846 he had not only over come the difficulty of scaling the rock, but had also succeeded in the extraordinary exploit of translating the whole of the ancient Persian inscription by applying his knowledge of other dialects to the words of the inscription on which his decipherment of the characters had allowed him to transliterate correctly, thus laying the foundation of the science of Assyriology. It was now only a matter of time to elucidate the Susian and Babylonian, the former yielding to the investigations of Hincks, Westergaard, De Saulcy and Norris, the latter to Rawlinson, Hincks, Oppert and Fox Talbot.
At the foot of the rock is a bas-relief of Gotarzes, the Parthian king (A.D. 46-50), with a Greek inscription (C.I.G. III., No. 4674 cf. Geiger and Kuhn, Grundriss d. Iranischen Philologie, ii. 504) which has been partly destroyed by an Arabic inscription, and about a quarter of a mile away is a rude monolith sculptured with figures in low relief, perhaps of Sassanian workmanship (Mann, Globus, lxxxiii., No. 21, 1903, 328; Williams Jackson, Persia, Past and Present, 210; King and Thompson, Inscr. of Darius the Great, xxv.) .
For the decipherment and description of these inscriptions of Darius, see Sir Henry Rawlinson, Journ. R. Geog. Soc. ix. ; J. R. Asiatic Soc. x. (1846), xiv. (1853), xv. (1855) ; Archaeologia, xxxiv. (1852); Weissbach and Bang, Die altpersischen Keilinschrif ten (1893) ; Weissbach, Die Achaemenideninschriften zweiter Art (189o) ; Bezold, Die (babylonischen) Achaemenideninschriften (1882) ; A. J. Booth, The Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Inscrip tions (1902); A. V. Williams Jackson, J. Am. Or. Soc. xxiv. (1993), and Persia, Past and Present (1906) ; L. W. King and R. C. Thomp son, The Inscription of Darius the Great at Behistun (1997) ; and for an illustrated popular account, R. C. Thompson in Hammerton's Wonders of the Past, 555.