Behistun Inscription

The Behistun Inscription, carved by order of Darius I around 520 BCE on a limestone cliff on the Kermanshah-Hamadan road, is the Rosetta Stone of Old Persian cuneiform — trilingual in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian, deciphered by Henry Rawlinson in 1835-47. The inscription lists the 23 satrapies of Darius’ empire including Gandhara (modern Peshawar valley), and Darius there refers to his own language explicitly as Aryan — the first datable use of the term as a political-ethnic self-designation. The place-name itself is Old Persian Bagastana, 'place of the gods' — Sanskrit Bhagasthana — and the shared Indo-Iranian religious vocabulary of the inscription is itself evidence of the India-Iran common linguistic past.