Publisher Description

Proto-Elamite is one of the world's earliest scripts and it remains only very partly deciphered. Excavations have uncovered c. 1,700 clay tablets from Iran, dating c. 3300–2900 BCE. The tablets use a complex system involving hundreds of symbols to count commodities, people, and institutions. Despite holding a privileged place in the history of writing, the study of proto-Elamite falls outside modern disciplinary boundaries and has received very limited scholarly attention since its discovery over a century ago. Nonetheless, a handful of scholars have shown that there is much we can learn about proto-Elamite and the people who used it, especially by taking interdisciplinary approaches. The ongoing decipherment project combines mathematics, a range of comparative studies, and a sustained effort to digitize the corpus and apply new tools from computer science.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction; 2. The Paths to Writing in Iran; 3. The Proto-Elamite World; 4. Approaches to Decipherment; 5. The System of Signs; 6. Proto-Elamite Economies and Their Participants; 7. Writing as Social Practice; 8. The Afterlife of Proto-Elamite.

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This Element explores the on-going decipherment of one of the world's earliest writing systems through interdisciplinary efforts.

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