Decipherment of Linear Elamite, part 2
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I was aware of this article nearly a week ago, but was too preoccupied with other matters to post on it till today.
French researcher cracks 4,000-year-old Elamite script from Iran
The 4,000-year-old Linear Elamite script from what is now Iran has long eluded archaeologists hoping to unlock the secrets of a near-forgotten age. French archaeologist François Desset's work on deciphering the writing system now has some comparing him to Jean-François Champollion, the famed philologist who deciphered ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.
By France 24 (28/04/2026)
War wages on, archeology and linguistics continue
While a modern-day war has focused the world's attention on Iran, for French archaeologist François Desset it was a millennia-old mystery that drew him to the country.
His quest: to decipher the 4,000-year-old writing system of Linear Elamite that had long been considered impossible to crack.
"Of all the writing systems used in Iran, the only one that is truly local – developed within the territory we now call Iran – is Linear Elamite," the 43-year-old told AFP, at his office at Belgium's University of Liege.
"All the others – cuneiform, the Arabic alphabet, or the Greek alphabet – were imported from the west."
Desset's fascination with the subject was sparked in 2006 when he participated in excavations in the south of Iran that unearthed tablets written in Linear Elamite.
Made up of 77 signs – diamonds, curves, and other geometric patterns – the writing system comes from the Bronze Age civilisation of Elam that long ago vanished from the region.
Susa rediscovered
Rediscovered in 1903 by a French mission exploring the archaeological site of Susa, it had stumped experts who only had a handful of sources to work with.
For years after his "first physical encounter", Desset struggled in vain to make a breakthrough.
"There were so many dead ends," he said.
That changed though when he gained access to vases covered in the writing that were held by the Mahboubian collection in London, named after a family of Iranians living in exile.
"I was able to access ten new texts, and the key was in them," he recounted.
"The key to deciphering a script, as is so often the case, lies in proper names: names of places, gods, kings."
Shilhaha: the importance of names
Desset's work has seen him likened to Jean-François Champollion, the famed French philologist who deciphered ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs at the start of the 19th century.
"What did it for Champollion, was the names of rulers, Ptolemy, Cleopatra … He identified the symbols that recorded the names of their names," Desset explained.
"My Ptolemy was a ruler named Shilhaha, who reigned around 1950 BC
In a sequence of four symbols, he noticed that the last two were identical, a repetition that corresponded to the ending of the name "Shilhaha".
Following that breakthrough, Desset now has been able to work on 45 inscriptions.
Now with the expertise he has gained he wants to go back even further and start to work on tablets written in proto-Elamite, "some of the oldest written sources in the world".
I believe that what he discovers will lead to unexpected interconnections in the rise of writing in the Middle East — and beyond.
Selected readings
- "Decipherment of Linear Elamite" (9/5/22)
- "Toward the decipherment of Harappan" (2/14/22)
- "Decipherment of the Indus script: new angles and approaches" (3/6/25)
[Thanks to Hiroshi Kumamoto]
Marein Schwartz said,
May 4, 2026 @ 8:59 pm
Check out the Wiki on GF Grotefend.He used royal names to decipher
Old Persian, and Champollion ægyptologically confirmed Grotefend's
decipherment of the name Xerxes. The article also mention's Desst's decipherment.
It's good that Grotefend knew to read the inscriptions from left to right.
–Unlike that semi-erudite chap who, reading the Hebrew Book of Esther on Xerxes (knowing that Heb. 'Hšwrš is a misspelling for
*'Hšyrš = OPers. /xšāyaršā/ 'Xerxes' and applying the right to left
direction of the Hebrew script to the Greek XERXES and reading it
backwards saw confirmation of that king's harem, as per the
Biblical data.(pardon my H for Heb. heth; I couldn't manage a underdotted h on my computer).
Martin Schwartz
Martin Schwartz
Chau said,
May 4, 2026 @ 11:42 pm
This story of breakthrough is also reported in National Geographic, January 2026, pp. 110-131, entitled, "Decoding the Lost Scripts of the Ancient World", by Joshua Hammer. It is a richly illustrated and diagrammed article. Highly recommended.
Philip Taylor said,
May 5, 2026 @ 2:00 am
Save this one for future use, Martin — "ḥ" [Unicode Character “ḥ” (U+1E25)].
It renders correctly in the "compose" window, but whether it will render correctly once posted is moot …
formaldehit said,
May 5, 2026 @ 5:16 am
This development is truly significant from a linguistic and archaeological perspective. Deciphering the 4,000-year-old Linear Elamite script means not only reading an alphabet, but also gaining direct access to the thought patterns, economy, and culture of a completely forgotten civilization.
The comparison of François Desset to Jean-François Champollion is not without reason. Just as Champollion's decipherment of hieroglyphs brought ancient Egypt to "speak," this work could make the Elamite civilization visible again.
However, there's an important point here: such "deciphered" announcements usually represent only the first stage. In the academic world, such solutions are tested, debated, and verified over time. So this is a start—but a very strong start.
David Marjanović said,
May 5, 2026 @ 9:31 am
Yes, but only about the specific period in Elamite civilization when this script was used. During other times, Elam used pretty ordinary cuneiform, and the texts in that script can be read (though the language remains difficult).
…though actually… it remains to be explored to which extent Linear Elamite is derived from the older Proto-Elamite script which hasn't been deciphered, so Linear may help with that, too.
Scott P. said,
May 5, 2026 @ 9:35 am
There is a lot more preserved written in Egyptian hieroglyphics than there is in Linear Elamite, which is the very reason it took so long to decipher.
Tom Dawkes said,
May 6, 2026 @ 3:20 pm
See 'The Decipherment of Linear Elamite Writing' by F. Desset et al. @ https://www.academia.edu/82452838/The_Decipherment_of_Linear_Elamite_Writing
Tom Dawkes said,
May 6, 2026 @ 3:24 pm
See also London Review of Books Vol. 47 No. 4 · 6 March 2025
Beyond Mesopotamia:
Tom Stevenson on the deciphering of Linear Elamite @https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n04/tom-stevenson/beyond-mesopotamia