11/13/2023 0 Comments Mayan glyphs letters![]() ![]() ![]() Since scholars had already been able to decode a fair amount of Cuneiform Elamite, including names, titles, and formulaic phrases that they now identified on the beakers as well, the puzzle came together quickly, and these scholars believe that they can now read seventy-two Linear Elamite signs with confidence. In a stroke of luck, the writing on the beakers also turned out to overlap with other Elamite-language texts written in a different system, a version of the cuneiform used to record Akkadian. Here there were no Akkadian inscriptions for comparison, but the texts did contain the names of known Elamite rulers, some of which were relatively easy to recognize: a phonetic rendering of the name Shilhaha, for instance, must contain the same sign or signs written twice in a row, and the sign for “shi” was already known from the Susa texts. Then came another breakthrough, when investigators focused on a group of inscriptions written on chunky silver beakers, luxury items that must have belonged to kings and courtiers. By 2018, however, that number had risen to only twelve. Once these sequences were indeed identified, specific sound-values could be assigned to the individual characters they contained.īy the 1920s nine of the seventy-six signs that appeared more than once in the small corpus had been tentatively read. One Akkadian inscription, for instance, refers to a local god, Sushinak (“Lord of Susa”), and a local king, Puzur-Sushinak in this case the overlap meant that if Linear Elamite was a phonetic writing system it should be possible to find the same two names by looking for partially identical sequences of Linear Elamite signs. Akkadian was deciphered in the nineteenth century as a largely syllabic script-one whose characters represent syllables rather than individual sounds, as an alphabet does-and although the Linear Elamite inscriptions weren’t direct translations of the Akkadian ones, it was always a good bet that they would contain some of the same names, which should sound the same in both languages. It has also long resisted decryption, not least because there is so little of it: only forty texts are known.Įarly clues came from objects found at the Elamite capital of Susa with inscriptions in both Linear Elamite and Akkadian, a Semitic language spoken in Mesopotamia and written in patterns of wedge-shaped (“cuneiform”) marks made in clay with a blunt stylus. 1 First identified by archaeologists in 1903, it’s a beauty: stark geometric characters composed of diamonds and triangles, circles and straight lines. Last summer a group of scholars announced that they had cracked Linear Elamite, a Bronze Age script used in the trading cities of Elam in the highlands of southern Iran, through which Central Asian tin, a crucial ingredient in bronze, was transported north to the Mesopotamian kingdoms of Babylon and Assyria.
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