This magnificent piece is the finest statue to have survived from the Achaemenid period. The king wears a Persian dress with a dagger stuck into his belt. The pleats of the robe are inscribed, on the right in cuneiform in the three official languages of the empire – Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian – and on the left in Egyptian hieroglyphs. These inscriptions give the titles of the king and record that the statue was made in Egypt on the orders of Darius, probably to be set up in a temple at Heliopolis.

Although the king wears a Persian costume, the pillar at the back and the decoration on the base are Egyptian in style. On the front and back of the base is Hapi, the Egyptian god of the Nile, and on the two long sides the peoples of the empire are represented by twenty-four cartouche fortresses, each with the name in hieroglyphs and a representation of them above. The people shown are Persian, Mede, Elamite, Arian, Parthian, Bactrian, Sogdian, Arachosian, Drangian, Sattagydian, Chorasmian, Sakan, Babylonian, Armenian, Lydian, Cappadocian, Skudrian, Assyrian, Arabian, Egyptian, Libyan, Nubian, Makan and Indian.

The statue is made of grey granite from the Wadi Hammamat in eastern Egypt. It was made in Egypt and later brought to Susa possibly in the reign of Xerxes.