Tagged “achaemenid”
HIGH WONDERThe Behistun Inscription
Why carve the founding document of an empire — 1,200 lines in three languages, the size of a house — a hundred metres up a sheer cliff, and then cut away the only ledge that could reach it, leaving a text meant to be read that essentially nobody could read for 2,300 years?
c. 520-518 BCE, Achaemenid Persia, reign of Darius I · Mount Behistun (Bisotun), Kermanshah Province, IranAdded September 2026
The Lycian Rock-Cut Tombs
Why did one people spend two centuries cutting their houses into cliffs — copying, beam for beam and plank for plank, a timber architecture that has since rotted away completely, so that the only surviving record of how Lycians lived is where they buried their dead?
mainly 5th-4th centuries BCE, with the great cliff necropoleis concentrated in the 4th century BCE · Lycia — Myra, Telmessos (Fethiye) and Xanthos, southwestern TürkiyeAdded August 2026