Nāme-ye Irān-e Bāstān 6/1&2 (2006-7): 45-74 The ‘Daivā’ Inscription Revisited Kamyar Abdi Dartmouth College Introduction Archaeology is our most vibrant tool for studying and interpreting the past. Using verifiable facts, archaeologists produce dynamics models to explain past events. A fact can be described as an observation drawn from the evidence, which, in archaeology, is usually the material remains. But, the framework in which observations are being made and facts are drawn from the evidence is itself hard to conceptualize. Facts are not value-free; they are theory-laden. The interpretation drawn from facts is therefore based on the theory the archaeologist deems relevant to his/her work, however implicit and unrecognized. Once theories are proposed, researchers attempt to falsify them. In doing so, they collect more evidence and from them induce more facts. As different models are proposed, researchers make further attempts to falsify them. Those that are falsified are usually abandoned and new models are proposed. Models that cannot be falsified based on available facts are generally accepted as viable theories to explain the question they are trying to address. My goal in this paper is to follow such a logical procedure in studying and interpreting an archaeological evidence from the Achaemenid period, the so- called ‘DaivƗ’ inscription of Xerxes. In a critique of previous scholarship on the ‘DaivƗ’ inscription I will argue that most studies have tried to fit this piece of evidence into preconceived notions about Achaemenid royal ideology. As a result, the ‘DaivƗ’ inscription has been dismissed as yet another rhetorical text