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Inscription bearing Persian King Darius The Great
By JERUSALEM POST 1-3-2023
An inscription bearing the name of the Persian king Darius the Great was discovered in the Tel Lachish National Park in the first discovery of an inscription bearing the king's name anywhere in Israel.
The discovery was made by Eylon Levy, the international media advisor to Israeli President Isaac Herzog.
Levy reportedly chanced on a 2,500-year-old potsherd with the inscribed letters of the ancient king and reported it to the Israel Antiquities Authority.
The king's name on the inscription, Darius the Great, is supposedly the father of King Ahasuerus, also known as the biblical Achashverosh from the story of Purim and the Book of Esther.
“When I picked up the ostracon and saw the inscription, my hands shook. I looked left and right for the cameras because I was sure someone was playing an elaborate prank on me," said Levy.
"When I was walking around here with a friend just exploring the history, I was turning over pieces of pottery and stones in my hand and suddenly, I found something that had letters on it and I thought this was too good to be true," Levy added.
When Levy found the potsherd, he reported it to the Israel Antiquities Authority, where he said that three people at the organization were skeptical that it was real but intrigued by what Levy had found.
A few weeks later, Levy received a phone call from Saar Ganor of the Israel Antiquities Authority and said that he was "on his way from the Dead Sea Scrolls labs. We've put it through three scanners. This is authentic. No modern had could do it and it's from two and a half thousand years ago from before the story of Purim."
"When I was walking around here with a friend just exploring the history, I was turning over pieces of pottery and stones in my hand and suddenly, I found something that had letters on it and I thought this was too good to be true."
Ganor analyzed Levy's discovery with Dr. Haggai Misgav of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and they both confirmed that the artifact dated to the Persian royal administration at Lachish in the Achaemenid period, at the turn of the fifth century BCE.
The inscription reads “Year 24 of Darius,” which dates back to 498 BCE. The king's reign began in 522 BCE and ended in 486 BCE.
Eli Escuzido, director of the Israel Antiquities Authority, stated that "It's amazing that visitors to the site come across such a rare inscription 'reviving' the Persian King Darius known to us from the sources! His son King Ahasuerus could never have imagined that we would find evidence of his father in Israel 2,500 years after the dramatic events in his royal court!”
Who was King Darius, King Ahasuerus?
Darius the Great, also known as Darius I, was one of the most famous rulers of the Achaemenid Empire, also known as the first incarnation of the Persian Empire. His rule saw him take over in a time of chaos, though he managed to reorganize what was then the largest empire of the ancient world into coherent satrapies, centralized authority with major construction projects, and monetary measures and promoted the Aramaic language.
Darius was also mentioned repeatedly throughout the Bible, having made appearances in the Book of Haggai, the Book of Zechariah and the Book of Ezra-Nehemiah. He is also believed by some scholars to either be the same person as or one of the inspirations of Darius the Mede, a central figure within the Book of Daniel.
Darius also had several sons, and while none of them were named Ahasuerus in Persian or Aramaic, his most famous son and successor, Xerxes I, also known as Xerxes the Great (named Khshayarsha in Persian), has been linked to the Persian ruler of the Purim story, though the exact level of historical accuracy in the Purim story has been heavily questioned by scholars for years.
Xerxes's portrayal in the Book of Esther as Ahasuerus has led some to believe he was an incompetent and always drunk monarch, while in fact, Xerxes was a very active ruler, though he is most famous for his ultimately failed war against the Greek city-states. But the fact that he was a very real monarch who indeed ruled over the region at the time of the Book of Esther is widely accepted.
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