The Enigma of Darius the Great's Rising; a Comparisons Between Iranian and Greek Narratives

After Over 80 years of publishing Olmstead's essays and book, his hypothesis upon which "Darius I's Claim in Behistun (Bīstūn) Inscription that tells Bardya was assassinated by Cambodia and the kingdom was usurped by Gaumatay the Magi was not true" is not absolutely proven as well as not rejected. To verify Darius's claims and skeptics' doubts, it has been tried in present study to examine the commonly used literary and political patterns in ancient Near East's inscriptions and comparing it with Greek history. The method used in this study is exploring the probability of the propaganda of the Achaemenid government on Greek historiography and to examine the positive or negative impacts of contradictions and exaggerations in the Greek histories on the credibility of the Behistun report. Based on the results, it seems that the logical defects of the case refer more to Greek reports than to Behistun's. And even in comparison, the Iranian narrative of the story seems more reasonable and more acceptable. The contradiction between the Greek and the Behistun sources can be a reason, instead of recognizing the totality of the story untrue, to prove that the Greek narratives were not the results of a government propaganda and they were produced on the basis of independent sources. The contradiction between the Greek and the Behistun sources, instead of recognizing the totality of the story as a non-historical, shows that Greek narratives were not the result of governmental propaganda, and they utilized scattered and independent sources. It also became clear that the Behistun's Inscription should be seen as a manifestation of a literary and epic tradition in continuation of the Iranian religious and Mesopotamian political patterns.