Darius the Great wanted everyone to know how he became king, and about 520 BC he had the story carved on a cliff beside the road from Babylon to Ecbatana. The inscription at Bisotun, high on the limestone face of the mountain, tells it in three languages, Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian, and a relief shows Darius with his foot on a defeated rival while nine captive rebels are roped together before him. The panel is about fifteen metres high and twenty-five wide, and it sits so high above the ground that for centuries nobody could read it.
In the 1830s and 1840s, a British army officer, Henry Rawlinson, had himself lowered on ropes and scaffolding to copy the text, and from it, scholars worked out how to read cuneiform writing, in the same way that the Rosetta Stone opened Egyptian hieroglyphs. The site was listed by UNESCO in 2006. Bisotun's name means place of the god, and the mountain was a sacred place long before Darius.
The site lies in the foothills of the Zagros, on the main road between Kermanshah to the south-east and Hamadan to the north-east, a route used by armies, traders and pilgrims for thousands of years. The road runs through a wide valley with the great wall of the mountain on one side, and the approach is simple, with a park, a pond and a path leading to the relief. The climate is hot and dry in summer and cold in winter, with snow on the heights. Spring is the best time, when the mountains are green and the air is clear.
Harsin, with about fifty-seven thousand people, is the nearest town of size and has fuel and food, while Kermanshah, a big city, has everything. The region is famous for sweets, notably the sesame and walnut pastries of Kermanshah, and for rice dishes cooked with local herbs. The ride that continues to Hamadan reaches the site of ancient Ecbatana, the summer capital of the Medes and Persians, and so the day follows the very road that Darius's armies used. Keep your travel documents handy and check current advice before travelling.