Linear Elamite

One of the toughest codes to break is an ancient writing system. Understanding Egyptian hieroglyphics took the lucky 1799 find of the Rosetta Stone, which translated a Demotic decree (the language of everyday ancient Egyptians) into Greek and hieroglyphics. Even so, French scholar Jean-Francois Champollion labored more than two painstaking decades to make sense of the strange Egyptian symbols.

Today, only a handful of millennia-old scripts remain unreadable. Thanks to a team of European scholars led by French archaeologist Francois Desset, one of the last holdouts might finally be deciphered: Linear Elamite, an obscure system used in what is now Iran.

If the findings are correct—and the claim is hotly debated by the researchers’ peers—then they could shed welcome light on a little-known society that flourished between ancient Mesopotamia and the Indus River Valley at the dawn of civilization. Recently published in the journal Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und vorderasiatische Archäologie, the analysis could also rewrite the evolution of writing itself. The paper uses newly examined inscriptions from a set of ancient silver beakers to propose a method for reading the symbols that make up Linear Elamite, potentially paving the way for understanding long-obscure texts.

“This is one of the major archaeological discoveries of the last decades,” says Massimo Vidale, an archaeologist at the University of Padua who was not involved in the research. “It was based on the same approach of Champollion’s breakthrough—identifying and reading phonetically the names of kings.”

Others, however, remain cautious until Desset and his colleagues publish detailed translations of texts.

The story begins more than 5,000 years ago, in the thriving city of Susa, on the fringe of the great Mesopotamian plain and the edge of the vast Iranian plateau that rises to the east. Susa was at the heart of an urban society spanning much of what is today southwestern Iran. The city’s western neighbors, the Sumerians, dubbed its residents the Elamites.

Elam was part of the world’s first surge of cities to use written symbols to administer an increasingly complex society. Early Elamites traded with both Mesopotamian kingdoms to the west and the Indus River civilization that flourished in what is today India and Pakistan. They created the foundation for later Persian kingdoms, including the Achaemenid dynasty that eventually subjugated much of the ancient Near East.

The Sumerians are credited with creating the first known writing system around 3100 B.C.E., using wedge-shaped marks made on wet clay that gave the script the name cuneiform (from the Latin word cuneus, or wedge). The system uses both syllables and images—logograms—to record language. It was adapted first for the Sumerian language and, later, for Akkadian and Hittite. Drawing on thousands of excavated clay tablets, 19th-century scholars deciphered the script, unlocking details on the economy, religion and government of the region.

Meanwhile, French archaeologists digging in Susa at the turn of the 20th century uncovered evidence of a writing system that seemed nearly as old as cuneiform but used a different set of symbols. The system apparently fell out of use, as scribes in Susa—for reasons that remain unclear—instead turned to cuneiform to write their language. About 800 years later, another home-grown system took hold. Scholars dubbed the earlier system Proto-Elamite and the second, which was believed to have grown out of the first, Linear Elamite; both were presumed to record the Elamite language, about which little is known.

Over the past century, archaeologists have uncovered more than 1,600 Proto-Elamite inscriptions, but only about 43 in Linear Elamite, scattered widely across Iran. The latter was used sporadically and fell out of use with the collapse of urban areas across the Middle East around 1800 B.C.E. Mesopotamian cuneiform and, later, the Greek alphabet and other scripts filled the gap.

Smithsonian