Language > Xerxes' the Great Inscription

Xerxes' the Great Inscription

Background

A stereotyped trilingual inscription of Xerxes the Great from the 5th century BC is inscribed upon a smoothed section of the rock face, some 20 meters (60 feet) above the ground near the fortress outside the modern city of Van. The niche was originally carved out by Xerxes' father King Darius, but left the surface Xerxes' the Great Inscription. The inscription survives in near perfect condition and is divided into three columns of 27 lines written in (from left to right) Old Persian, Babylonian, and Elamite. It is the only known Achaemenid royal inscription located outside of Iran. Other cuneiform inscriptions are typically off limits unless to large tour groups. It states that:

"A great god is Ahuramazda, the greatest of gods, who created this earth, who created that sky, who created man, who created happiness for man, who made Xerxes king, one king for all, one ruler for all.

I am Xerxes, the great king, the king of kings, king of all kinds of peoples with all kinds of origins, king of this earth great and wide, the son of king Darius, the Achaemenid.

King Xerxes says: King Darius, my father, by the grace of Ahuramazda built much that was good, and he gave orders to dig this niche out, but because he did not make an inscription, I ordered this inscription to be made.

May Ahuramazda and the other gods protect me, my kingdom, and what I have made."

When it was published by Eugène Burnouf in 1836,[2] through his realization that it included a list of the satrapies of Darius (repeated by Xerxes in nearly identical language), he was able to identify and publish an alphabet of thirty letters, most of which he had correctly deciphered. Burnouf's reading of the Van trilingual inscription had made a significant contribution to the deciphering of Old Persian cuneiform.

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Sources

Burnouf, Mémoire sur deux inscriptions cunéiformes trouvées près d'Hamadan et qui font partie des papiers du Dr Schulz, Paris, 1836; Schulz, an orientalist from Hesse, had been sent out by the French foreign ministry to copy inscriptions but had been murdered in 1829; see Arthur John Booth, The Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions 1902, esp. pp 95ff, 206.