Behistun inscription

VIEW:414 DATA:2020-03-20

It is a large size inscription, measuring 7.6 by 15.24 meters. It was situated at an elevation of 106.68 meters, on the precipice of the Zagros mountains, southwest of Hamadan, Persia. It also featured words in three languages, all used by the ancients, but also unknown to modern scholars. Henry C. Rawlinson, an English military man, feeling challenged to decipher these strange yet refined languages, carried out his shaggy work on a 36 to 46 cm ledge. located further down, or sitting in a suspended cage. After four years of dangerous work, he managed to make a complete copy of the inscriptions. Eighteen years later, he had completely deciphered the three languages: ancient Persian cuneiform, Elamite (susancheio), and Babylonian cuneiform. With these three keys, Rawlinson and other scholars have cracked the precious secrets of Assyria's missing civilizations. Babylon and Persia, nations whose peoples played important roles in the development of the great episodes of the Bible.

The use of these languages ​​in correspondence and diplomatic exchanges was revealed in 1887, when a Bedouin woman, in search of fertile land for her garden, dug on the promontory of TelI el-Amama, where, on the eastern bank of the Nile, the ruins lay. from what was once the beautiful city of Pharaoh Akhenaton's dream. The woman found clay tablets with inscriptions and sold them for fifty cents on the US dollar. Missionary ChaunéyMurch heard about the find and informed the Egyptian authorities. After a thorough examination, it was proven that those tablets were the official diplomatic records of the Egyptian foreign ministry, during the reigns of Amenhotep III (1413 to 1376 BC.) And his son and successor, Amenhotep IV (Akhenaton, 1375 to 1358 B.C). Among the records were official communications from the monarchs of Babylon, Mitani and other Asian countries; however, most were letters written by the governors of several city districts in Palestine, Phenicia and southern Syria (approximately 150 of them were from Palestine itself).

The TelI el-Amarna tablets have been very important in biblical investigations, so much so that many consider them the most important discovery ever made in Egypt. The very fact that most of these tablets are written in Babylonian cuneiform, even though they come from several countries, indicates that the Babylonian cuneiform was the writing system understood by almost all the peoples of the biblical lands during that time, and perhaps much earlier and after her. Biblical characters were able to converse with various peoples without difficulty, as they moved from one country to another, as the Bible indicates .

Interest in archaeological discoveries had intensified by the time the tablets were found, and from that date onwards several calls were made for more topographical investigations and more excavations in the small hills of the cities to be carried out. There was an immediate response from England, Germany, France, the United States, and other countries. Governments, universities, museums and influential people financed the expeditions, and the work continued under the direction of competent men and women, who discovered how the ruins of ancient civilizations agreed with what the Bible and other ancient literary sources wrote about them. .

Today, after 200 years of topographical and archaeological investigations, it can be said that the great army of scholars has collected the threads of primitive life hidden under thousands of mounds that hid ancient cities, and with them he wove a panel that agrees almost perfectly with the lives and events surrounding the characters cited by the Bible.

Archeology has brought to the light of our days thousands of "external" evidences that confirm the narrations of Scripture.