About 12 kilometers southwest of the ancient city of Ecbatana (modern Hamadan) in western Iran, and at an altitude of 2,000 meters on Mount Alvand, there are two huge panels carved into the rock. They are cuneiform inscriptions made in the time of Darius I the Great and his son Xerxes I.
At some point in antiquity, possibly after Alexander's conquest, the inscriptions became unreadable as there was no longer anyone who knew how to read the ancient cuneiform script.
The local people began to elaborate legends and conjectures about them, and came to the conclusion that they must contain the secret code that led to a fabulous hidden treasure, so they called the place Ganj Nameh, literally book of treasures .
On his 1839 trip to Iran commissioned by the Institut de France, the painter and archaeologist Eugène Flandin made drawings of the inscriptions that later Henry Rawlinson, the father of Assyriology, managed to decipher. According to Rawlinson, the inscriptions were created on the occasion of one of the trips that both Darius and Xerxes made annually between Ecbatana, the summer residence of the Persian kings and capital of the kingdom of Media, and Babylon.
Ganj Nameh was thus located on the northern branch of the royal road built by Darius, which led to Mesopotamia and ended in Sardes, already in Anatolia, after crossing the entire empire.
The inscriptions are carved on a granite rock, just above a stream, and measure 3 meters wide by 2 meters high. They are flanked by holes, which probably served to secure some kind of protective cover. There is also a terrace carved into the rock above the inscriptions.
The one on the left was made by Darius I the Great (549-486 BC) and the one on the right by Xerxes I (519-465 BC). Both are trilingual as was usual for Achaemenid inscriptions since Darius I. The left block of the inscriptions, 20 lines long, is written in Old Persian, then there is a Neo-Elamite block in the center, and the Neo-Babylonian version to the right.
Old Persian cuneiform is the most recent of the three writing systems, requiring only 34 characters. It was a script of letters that read from left to right and used the wedges tilted to the left as word separators.
In contrast, Elamite and Babylonian required 200 and 600 characters, respectively, since they were syllabic scripts.
Darius's inscription reads:
Xerxes says:
As can be seen, both use the same formulas established during the reign of Darius I the Great, which will be repeated in many other inscriptions throughout the Persian empire. The only difference between the two is the additional predicate on Ahura Mazda, the god of the Zoroastrian religion, which appears in the Xerxes inscription:the greatest of the gods .
Since 1995 you can read the translations into English and current Persian engraved on two granite rocks, very close to the original inscriptions.