Their importance can be seen from the famous Persian inscription at
Bisitun in western Iran, where Darius I (who did not mess around) took great pleasure in showing off about how he had defeated the Scythians 'utterly'--perhaps not quite fake news, but certainly putting something of a gloss on things.
"Given the fact that human fossils from this period have been found in
Bisitun and Shanidar caves, it is safe to assume that the residents of the area had most likely been from the Neanderthal species that became extinct about 40,000 years ago," he said.
The first are public documents, often bi- and trilingual, and include the great trilingual inscription of Darius I at
Bisitun (DB).
In his monumental
Bisitun Inscription, Darius the Great boasts of how the Median pretender Phraortes (Fravartish) "was captured and brought to me.
The view of the Zagros in the distance was breathtaking, Darius's famous monument at
Bisitun was right down the road, and there was an excellent hotel in Hamadan with a great restaurant and a pool for weekend respites.
High on a cliff in the town of
Bisitun in Persia is an inscription placed there by Darius the Great of Persia.
The
Bisitun Inscriptions of Darius the Great: Old Persian Text (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1991),53; see Darius at Susa E, in Kent, 014 Persian, 142.
But such a crass assessment does not do justice to Schmitt's penetrating examination of the evidence for Median names and phonetic elements evidenced in Assyrian, Babylonian (specifically of the
Bisitun Inscription), Elamite, Old Persian, and Greek texts.
Most of this chapter is devoted to the decipherment of cuneiform by way of Darius I's
Bisitun Inscription and the Achaemenid inscriptions at Persepolis and elsewhere (pp.
Greenfield and Bezalel Porten, trs., The
Bisitun Inscription of Darius the Great: Aramaic Version, Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum (London: Lund Humphries, 1982), 21, 62; A.