Have Scholars Finally Deciphered a Mysterious Ancient Script?

[Peter1469]

A little known kingdom to the east of ancient Sumer just got its writing system decoded. Maybe.

Have Scholars Finally Deciphered a Mysterious Ancient Script?

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.

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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.

[Chuck]

When I see those old cuneiform tablets I can't help thinking they were made by dancing chickens on hallucinogens.

[Banks of Sabis]

What is most interesting about the Elamites and (likely also Iranic origin) Sumerians is that both are linguistic isolates, unrelated to any remaining modern language families.

Not only are they both unrelated to any existing language families, or to each other, but they develop the earliest writing tech, were generally in constant conflict with one another, and the final end of the Sumerian city states came at the hands of the Elamites in conjunction with a "Su" people. This is almost certainly the Amorite 'Su' tribal nomads, not forces from 'Susa', but a hallmark of even extinct human populations seems to be the determination to wipe each other out,

and the surviving elements of the human race do not seem to have learned much in the interim.

[Chuck]

What is most interesting about the Elamites and (likely also Iranic origin) Sumerians is that both are linguistic isolates, unrelated to any remaining modern language families.

Not only are they both unrelated to any existing language families, or to each other, but they develop the earliest writing tech, were generally in constant conflict with one another, and the final end of the Sumerian city states came at the hands of the Elamites in conjunction with a "Su" people. This is almost certainly the Amorite 'Su' tribal nomads, not forces from 'Susa', but a hallmark of even extinct human populations seems to be the determination to wipe each other out,

and the surviving elements of the human race do not seem to have learned much in the interim.

Yes, those language isolates are indeed intriguing; they're like monkey wrenches tossed into every ancient theory.