The king of kings Darayavaush, the king of the Persians, the ruler of many nations, whom the Greeks called Darius, one day decided to erect a monument to himself during his lifetime. He conceived to create a unique, eternal monument, and he succeeded better than the overwhelming majority of despots both before him and after.
The site for the monument was Mount Behistun on the territory of ancient Media. At an altitude of 50 meters above the road that connects Babylon and Ecbatana (now the territory of Iran).
To fulfill the will of the king, the sculptors chose a steep section of the rock and carved out on it a huge flat rectangle measuring about 7 meters in height and 22 meters in width. A bas-relief was cut down on the stone canvas: several figures in human height. Darius himself is the largest of all: the sculptors strictly observed the canons. He has large eyes and arched eyebrows, a curled beard, and on his head a warrior's crown, carved finely and carefully: Darius demanded precision in details. The king raised his hand to the winged god hovering over him, and with his foot trampled on the main of his enemies - Gaumata. Two courtiers are standing behind Darius. They hold his bow and spear. Eight more kings, conquered by him, lined up, facing the king, defeated and dejected. Their hands are tied, and their necks are tied with a common rope.
But Darius was prudent and, perhaps, assumed that without the inscription, the meaning of the proud picture would be incomprehensible to descendants. He ordered the remaining area of the wall to be filled with an inscription in three languages. In Old Persian - the language of the king and court, in Akkadian (Babylonian) and, finally, in the Elamite language. The inscription consists of 515 lines in Old Persian, 141 lines in Babylonian and 650 lines in Elamite. The inscriptions and reliefs can only be seen from afar, it is impossible to do this at close range.
As soon as the sculptors finished their work, the calligraphers knocked out a long inscription, when Darius, who had not been sitting idly all this time, returned from another campaign, defeating the Scythian king, "wearing a pointed cap." The order followed: to add to the defeated kings and the Scythian king. It was necessary to cut down the Elamite text and in its place, the last in the chain of kings to attach a Scythian. The bas-relief was flatter than the others, but the difference was not noticeable from below. And the partially cut off inscription was knocked out again in another place.
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After in 523-521. BC e. the sculptors of Darius, having finished their work, went downstairs, they destroyed the stone steps behind them in order to exclude any possibility of going up to the monument again. Perhaps that is why the Behistun inscription has survived to this day relatively well: for two and a half millennia, no one simply managed to get close to the monument.