Darius I

Darius I, born Dārayavauš ("He who holds firm the good"), came to the throne in 522 BCE after the murder of "the false Smerdis" (Gaumata). Before his coronation he had been a spear-bearer to Cambyses II. Modern historians increasingly view his rise as a usurpation that he later rewrote at Behistun, recasting the rightful Bardiya as an impostor and himself as Ahura Mazda's chosen restorer.

His first regnal year was an emergency. Revolts erupted from Elam to Media, Parthia, Egypt and Saka country; nine "lying kings" took up arms. Darius crushed them within a year, mutilating and impaling their leaders and announcing it in cuneiform on a cliff at Behistun — proclaimed to subjects who could not read it but could see it.

His lasting achievement was administrative. He divided the empire into roughly twenty satrapies, each watched by an independent secretary, treasurer and garrison commander, with royal inspectors — "the king's eyes and ears" — completing the audit. He built the Royal Road from Sardis to Susa (2,400 km, 111 way stations), reducing a 90-day journey to seven days by relay courier. He made Aramaic the chancery language and issued the gold daric — the first universal coinage of the Near East.

He conquered the Indus Valley, completed a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea (the prototype of Suez), and crossed the Bosphorus against the European Scythians, who evaded him by scorched-earth tactics. His famous failure was the punitive expedition after the Ionian Revolt: at Marathon in 490 BCE the Persians were beaten by Miltiades. Preparing a second invasion, he was diverted by an Egyptian revolt and died in October 486 BCE, aged about sixty-four. His tomb at Naqsh-e Rostam still carries inscriptions DNa and DNb on the duties of a king.

His legacy runs in two directions. He bequeathed Rome, the Han and modern empires the kit for running vast multi-ethnic territory. And his trilingual Behistun Inscription became, in the 19th century, the Rosetta Stone of cuneiform.