Proto-Elamite script

The Proto-Elamite script is an early Bronze Age writing system briefly in use before the introduction of Elamite cuneiform.

There are many similarities between the Proto-Elamite tablets and the contemporaneous proto-cuneiform tablets of the Uruk IV period in Mesopotamia. Both writing systems are a relatively isolated phenomenon. Singletons aside tablets have been found at only five Proto-Elamite sites. For comparison, Proto-cuneiform tablets have only been found at Uruk, Jemdet Nasr, Khafajah, and Tell Uqair, and the vast majority of each type have been found at Susa and Uruk. The tablet blanks themselves, the inscribing method, even the practice of using the reverse for summation, when needed, are the same. They serve the same basic function which is administrative accounting of goods in a centrally controlled society. From that base, there are also differences, the signs themselves being the most obvious but extending to smaller areas such as the order in which the tablet was inscribed, are clear. Fortunately, there are a number of similarities between the numeric systems of Proto-cuneiform and Proto-Elamite. Proto-Elamite, in addition to the usual sexagesimal and base-120, also uses its own decimal system.

Beginning around the 9th millennium BC, a token based system came into use in various parts of the ancient Near East. These evolved into marked tokens and later marked envelopes, often called clay bullae. It is usually assumed that these were the basis for the development of Proto-Elamite as well as proto-cuneiform (with many of the tokens, about two-thirds, having been found in Susa). Tokens remained in use after the development of proto-cuneiform and Proto-Elamite.

The earliest tablets found in the region are of a "numerical" type, containing only lists of numbers. They are found not only at Susa and Uruk, but in a variety of sites, including those without later Proto-Elamite and proto-cuneiform tablets, like Tell Brak, Habuba Kabira, Tepe Hissar, Godin Tepe and Jebel Aruda.

Linear Elamite is attested much later in the last quarter of the . It is uncertain whether the Proto-Elamite script was the direct predecessor of Linear Elamite. Both scripts remain largely undeciphered, and a postulated relationship between the two is speculative.

Early on, similarities were noted between Proto-Elamite and the Cretan Linear A script.

Corpus

The Proto-Elamite writing system was used over a very large geographical area, stretching at least from Susa in the west to Tepe Yahya in the east. The known corpus of inscriptions consists of some 1600 tablets, the vast majority unearthed at Susa where the first two
tablets were found by Jacques de Morgan in the late 1800s.

Proto-Elamite tablets have been found at the following sites, in order of how many tablets have been recovered:
* Susa (more than 1600 tablets and fragments)
* Anshan, or Tall-I Malyan (33 tablets and fragments)
* Tepe Yahya (27 tablets, tablet blanks found)Peter Damerow and Robert K. Englund, "The Proto-Elamite Texts from Tepe Yahya", The American School of Prehistoric Research Bulletin 39, Cambridge, MA, 1989
* Tepe Sofalin (12 tablets and fragments)
* Tepe Sialk (5 tablets)
*Ozbaki (one tablet)
* Shahr-e Sukhteh (one tablet)
*Tal-e Ghazir (one numerical tablet fragment)
* Tepe Hissar (one tablet)

Glyphs found in Proto-Elamite texts are divided in numerical (with an N profix) and text (with a M prefix). Of the 1000s of text glyphs in the current corpus more than half are numerical. The meaning of a numerical glyph may depend on which system it is being used in, decimal (D), sexagesimal (S), bisexagesimal (B), or capacity (C).

Publications

*MDP 6 - V. Scheil, "Textes élamites-sémitiques (Troisième série)", Mémoires de La Délégation En Perse 6, Paris: Leroux, 1905
*MDP 17 - V. Scheil, "Textes de Comptabilité Proto-Élamites (Nouvelle Série)", Mémoires de La Mission Archéologique de Perse, Tome 17, Paris, 1923
*MDP 26 - V. Scheil, "Textes de Comptabilité Proto-Élamites (Troisième Série)", Mémoires de La Mission Archéologique de Perse, Tome 26., Paris, 1935
*MDP 31 - Mecquenem, Roland de, and Marguerite Rutten, "Épigraphie Proto-Élamite ; Archéologie Susienne", Mémoires de La Délégation Archéologique En Iran, Tome 31. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949
*RA 50 - de MECQUENEM, R., "Notes Protoélamites", Revue d’Assyriologie et d’archéologie Orientale, vol. 50, no. 4, pp. 200–04, 1956
*TCL 32 - Dahl, J. L., "Proto-Elamite Tablets and Fragments", Textes Cunéiforme du Louvre 32, Paris: Khéops /Louvre éditions Publishing, 2019

Decipherment attempts

The first step in deciphering an unknown writing system is getting the known corpus fully published and developing a proposed sign list. The publishing of the texts has now been mostly completed but the sign list is still partly a work in progress. Proto-Elamite has many singleton signs (like early stages of proto-cuneiform) due to texts being primarily consumed only locally and there is disagreement over whether some signs are different or merely variants but by 1974 enough of a consensus over the Proto-Elamite signs was reached to enable the decipherment process to advance.

In 2012, Dr Jacob Dahl of the University of Oxford announced a project to make high-quality images of Proto-Elamite clay tablets and publish them online. His hope is that crowdsourcing by academics and amateurs working together would be able to understand the script, despite the presence of mistakes and the lack of phonetic clues. Dahl assisted in making the images of nearly 1600 Proto-Elamite tablets available online. Materials were put online on a wiki of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative.

In 2020, , of the Laboratoire Archéorient in Lyon, France, announced a proposed decipherment and translation of proto-Elamite texts. In 2022 Desset published a paper on Linear Elamite which also proposed sign forms for Proto-Elamite (recasting it as "Early Proto-Iranian"). This new proposal was not met with universal agreement.

Although the decipherment of Proto-Elamite remains uncertain, the content of many texts is known. This is possible because certain signs, and in particular a majority of the numerical signs, are similar to the neighboring Mesopotamian writing system proto-cuneiform. In addition, a number of the Proto-Elamite signs are actual images of the objects they represent. However, the majority of the Proto-Elamite signs are entirely abstract, and their meanings can only be deciphered through careful graphemic analysis.

An example from a small tablet (Sb 06355) from Susa where most signs are known:

While the Elamite language has been suggested as a candidate underlying the Proto-Elamite inscriptions, there is no positive evidence of this. The earliest Proto-Elamite inscriptions, being purely ideographic, do not in fact contain any linguistic information nor is it known for certain what language was spoken in the relevant area during the Proto-Elamite Period.Jöran Friberg, "The Third Millennium Roots of Babylonian Mathematics I-II", Göteborg, 1978/79

References

Further reading

*Afshari, Hassan, and Ruhollah Yousefi Zashk, "An Investigation on Connection of Ideograms Related to the Chain of Phonetic Signs in the Proto-Elamite Writing System", Journal of Archaeological Studies 14.1, pp. 1–22, 2022
*Amiet, P., "Il y a 5000 ans les elamites inventaient l’ecriture", Archeologia 12, pp. 16–23, 1966

Logan Born et al., "Compositionality of Complex Graphemes in the Undeciphered Proto-Elamite Script using Image and Text Embedding Models" in Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021, pp. 3136–3146 August 2021

Born, Logan, et al., "Disambiguating Numeral Sequences to Decipher Ancient Accounting Corpora", Proceedings of the Workshop on Computation and Written Language (CAWL 2023), 2023

Born, Logan, et al., "Sign clustering and topic extraction in Proto-Elamite", Proceedings of the 3rd Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature, 2019
*Brice W.C., "The Writing System of the Proto-Elamite Account Tablets of Susa," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 45, pp. 15–39, 1962
*Dahl, J.L., Hawkins, LF., Kelley, K., "Labor Administration in Proto-Elamite Iran", in A. Garcia-Ventura (Ed.), What’s in a Name? Terminology related to Work Force and Job Categories in the Ancient Near East, (= Alter Orient und Altes Testament 440), Münster : Ugarit-Verlag, pp. 15-44, 2018


Jacob L. Dahl, "The proto-Elamite seal MDP 16, pl. XII fig. 198", in ''Cuneiform Digital Library Notes'', CDLN 2014:1, 2014


Jacob L. Dahl, "New and old joins in the Louvre proto-Elamite tablet collection", in ''Cuneiform Digital Library Notes'', CDLN 2012:6, 2012
* Dahl, Jacob L, "Animal Husbandry in Susa during the Proto-Elamite Period" SMEA, vol.47, pp. 81–134, 2005

Jacob L. Dahl, "Complex Graphemes in Proto-Elamite", Cuneiform Digital Library Journal, CDLJ 2005–3, 2005

Dahl, Jacob L., "Proto-Elamite sign frequencies", Cuneiform Digital Library Bulletin 2002.1, 2002
*Daneshmand, Parsa, "Against Cuneiform: The Dawn of Writing in Iran", Iranica Antiqua 59, pp. 1-24, 2024

François Desset, "The Proto-Elamite writing in Iran", Archéo-Nil, pp. 67–104, 2016
*Dittmann, R., "Seals, Sealings and Tablets: Thoughts on the Changing Patterns of Administrative Control from the Late-Uruk to Proto-Elamite Period at Susa", Pp. 332–366 in Ğamdat Nasr. Period or Regional Style? Papers given at a Symposium held in Tübingen November 1983. Beihefte zum Tubinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients. Reihe B 62, eds.U. Finkbeiner and W. Rollig. Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 1986

Englund, R.K, "The Proto-Elamite Script," in: Peter Daniels and William Bright, eds. The World's Writing Systems (1996). New York/Oxford, pp. 160–164, 1996

Laura F. Hawkins, "A New Edition of the Proto-Elamite Text MDP 17", ''Cuneiform Digital Library Journal'', CDLJ 2015:001, 2015
*Kelley, Kathryn, et al., "Image-aware language modeling for Proto-Elamite", Lingue e linguaggio 21.2, pp. 261–294, 2022

atthews, Roger, et al., "Information revolutions and information transitions: counting, sealing, writing in Iran 10,000–300 BC", Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History, 2025
*Scheil, V., "Documents archaïques en écriture proto-élamite", Revue Biblique (1892–1940), vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 372–76, 1905


rancois Vallat, "The Most Ancient Scripts of Iran: The Current Situation", World Archaeology, vol. 17, no. 3, Early Writing Systems, pp. 335–347, Feb. 1986
*Francois Vallat, "Les Tablettes Proto-Elamites de l’Acropole (Campagne 1972)", Cahiers de la delegation archeologique francaise en Iran III, pp. 93-105, 1973
*Walker, C. B. F., "Elamite Inscriptions in the British Museum", Iran, vol. 18, pp. 75–81, 1980
*Yeganeh, Sepideh Jamshidi, "Correlation of Sealings and Content on Proto-Elamite Tablets Four Unpublished Sealings in the National Museum of Iran", Iranica Antiqua 56, pp. 171–187, 2021

External links

Interview with Francois Desset on his proposed decipherment – The Postil Magazine – Sep 2021
* (crowdsourcing materials)
Proposal to encode Proto-Elamite in Unicode - Anshuman Pandey - August 18, 2023Proto-Elamite tablets online at CDLI

{{Iran topics

Bronze Age writing systems
Elamite language
Obsolete writing systems
Undeciphered writing systems