Proto-Elamite script

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. • Anshan, or Tall-I Malyan (33 tablets and fragments) • Tepe Yahya (27 tablets, tablet blanks found) • Tepe Sofalin (12 tablets and fragments) • Tepe Sialk (5 tablets) • Ozbaki (one tablet) • Shahr-e Sukhteh (one tablet) • Tall-e Geser (one numerical tablet fragment, not Proto-Elamite script) • Tepe Hissar (one tablet) A significant number of Proto-Elamite tablets remain unpublished. ==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. ==References==