[Behistun]. A rock face in northwest Iran on which Darius I placed a trilingual inscription recording his military victories in 516 bc. The inscription was in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian, all three written in the cuneiform script. In spite of the difficulty of gaining access to the high vertical face and of copying the inscriptions, this feat was accomplished by Henry Rawlinson between 1835 and 1844. It enabled him subsequently to understand the cuneiform script and to decipher the languages of the inscription. This provided the breakthrough to the decipherment later of other languages in the cuneiform script, including Sumerian.
The Macmillan dictionary of archaeology, Ruth D. Whitehouse, 1983Copied