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International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Vol XXXV, Part B5. Istanbul 2004
meaning of the relief and inscriptions at Bisotun. The only
source of information about Achaemenids were the remaining
of the Roman and Greek writings. In 15° century, the European
tourists entered Persepolis and a lot of investigations on the
language and history of Persia began (Schlumberger, 1963).
Many orientalists tried to decode the Old Persian writings. In
1621 Pietro Della Valle (Italian), in 1647 Jean Chardin (French)
and in 1765 Neibuhr (Danish) have made copies of Bisotun
document. Tychen (German) discovered the meaning of onc
alphabetical letter in the inscription! An important report is
given by Grotefend (German) in 1802. He found 13 different
forms of the proper names and distinguished the word
VAZARKA (big) and also the word Dariush. During period
1831-1837, Sir Henry Rawlinson hanged himself from the top
of the Bisotun mountain to make hand-copies of the inscription
(Figure 9).
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Figure 9. Signature of Rawlinson on Dariush Inscription
Rawlinson worked for more than 20 years on the cuneiform
writing and succeeded to read Old Persian, Elamite and
Babylonian. He was awarded and acknowledged by the Iranian
and British governments. But this was not the end of work in
Bisotun and other experts continued to find better recording and
decoding for that monument, among them G.G. Cameron, R.G.
Kent, L.W. King and R.C. Thompson were the major
researchers.
PHOTOGRAMMETRIC DOCUMENTATION
The nearly vertical location of the bed rock of the document and
its height cause difficult situation for making copies or
moulding of the relief and inscriptions. This has led to the
unreliability of the documentations and decodings. To overcome
this deficiency photogrammetry should be employed which was
the subject of this report and one of the stages of Bisotun Relief
and Inscription Documentation project. For a long time, the use
of photogrammetric technique for the documentation of this
valuable and unique monument was investigated and desired by
the authorities of the Iranian cultural heritage. But, the
extremely difficult and dangerous position of the monument for
photogrammetric and geodetic operations, was the major reason
for national and international companies to refuse undertaking
the project.
In spite of the mentioned problems, the photogrammetric
approach was performed through an academic project. Among
other difficulties of the project, it should be mentioned that the
form of the narrow valley in front of the document dictated to
perform the geodetic operations on a semi-hanged scaffolding
(Figure 10). Bad climate conditions and changing weather were
another problems that were taken into account.
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Figure 10. Scaffolding
The scale of the produced maps is 1:5 with 5 mm contour
intervals (Figure 12). In this project, a P31 Wild
photogrammetric camera was used. The photography scale was
1:30 and Control network was established using a Sokkia
PoweSet 1000 total station (Figure 14). All relieves and
inscriptions (more than 120000 cuneiform elements) as well as
the surrounding objects were photogrammetrically documented
with a precision of about 1mm (Figure 17). More detailed
technical information can be found in our previous report in
(Zolfaghari and malian, 2000).
Sculptures
