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Tagged “iran”

• HIGH WONDER

  The 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
• HIGH WONDER

  The Qanats of Gonabad

  How did Iron Age well-diggers, working by lamplight with hand picks and a rope windlass, sink a shaft roughly 300 metres into the desert and then drive a tunnel some 33 kilometres back to the surface — holding a gradient of a fraction of a percent the whole way, underground, with no way to see where they were going?

  c. 700-500 BCE, Achaemenid era (traditionally attributed to a legendary king centuries earlier) · Gonabad, Razavi Khorasan Province, IranAdded September 2026