The text on this cliff is funnier than it looks. Carved twenty metres up the rock of Van, it runs in three columns, Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian, 27 lines each, all saying the same thing. Here is what it says: “A great god is Ahuramazda, the greatest of gods, who created this earth, who created that sky, who created man, who created happiness for man, who made Xerxes king, one king for all, one ruler for all. I am Xerxes, the great king, the king of kings, king of all kinds of peoples, king of this earth great and wide, the son of king Darius, the Achaemenid. King Xerxes says: King Darius, my father, by the grace of Ahuramazda built much that was good, and he gave orders to dig this niche out, but because he did not make an inscription, I ordered this inscription to be made.” An imperial monument whose real subject is an empty panel his father left behind.