1.1 An Era of Symbol Experimentation

‘Thinking up’ writing may seem natural, as described in Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories (Reference Kipling1902), in which a young girl and her father laze by the river devising the shape of letters based on shapes around them. But writing was invented only a handful of times in human history in contexts where the idea of writing did not already exist. The proto-Elamite system of Iran is one of the first inventions of writing. We have much to learn about what human behaviours and circumstances led a small number of people in three regions – Egypt, southern Iraq, and western Iran – to nearly simultaneously transform visual communication at the end of the fourth millennium BCE with the creation of complex ‘proto-writing’ systems.

Proto-Elamite is a system of accounting written on clay tablets with a stylus. It was used at sites in Iran between roughly 3300 and 2900 BCE, although precise dating remains problematic. It was a precocious and sophisticated development in symbol use: one of the longest preserved texts (Figure 1), which still awaits its first published study, dwarfs in length any contemporaneous sample of hieroglyphic writing from Egypt and is rivalled by few proto-cuneiform tablets from Iraq. Yet unlike those other scripts, proto-Elamite did not develop into a multipurpose writing system in the following centuries. Instead, tablets stopped appearing in the early third millennium BCE along with other disruptions or discontinuities in the material culture at proto-Elamite sites.

Proto-Elamite represents one of the largest remaining challenges of ancient script decipherment. While Egypt’s hieroglyphs and Iraq’s cuneiform have dominated the story of the invention of writing because of their impressive continuity over three millennia following their invention, proto-Elamite offers us a different vantage point on the conditions in which early societies were playing with and systematising images at a pivotal time in the history of human technology.

Figure 1

Scheil (Reference Scheil1905) no. 5242/P272825 is one of the longest proto-Elamite tablets, recording about 36,000 proto-Elamite litres of grain and over a hundred complex, undeciphered designations. The tablet is shown in the traditional publication orientation (Section 5.5). The reverse is rolled twice with a cylinder seal depicting bulls and lions in alternating human and animal poses: turn your head ninety degrees left to see the figures in their original orientation.

Note: Tablets are cited by publication and Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) P-number (https://cdli.earth).

Images: © Musée du Louvre, Dist. GrandPalaisRmn/Raphaël Chipault.

At their outset, none of the three new proto-writing systems had developed into writing as we now know it. We use writing as a secondary code that relies heavily on conveying meaning through the sounds and grammatical elements of language, which is the primary code. This is a strategy called glottography (‘language writing’), and it is a technology that has dramatically shaped human history since its first inception nearly 5,000 years ago. In writing systems, we call signs used without necessary recourse to particular words ideographic or semasiographic. Consider the following:

Ideographic strategies were prominent in ancient proto-writing systems, including proto-Elamite. Proto-writing holds the key to understanding how pre-literate visual communication strategies developed into writing, including how early scribes experimented with glottography before it became the dominant and entrenched strategy. Proto-writing also challenges us to consider alternatives to writing-as-we-know-it: after all, one of the great opportunities of the archaeological record is the chance to observe different ways humans have done things in the past and to expand our perspective on how humans do (and can) behave and create (Graeber & Wengrow Reference Graeber and Wengrow2021). More complete decipherment of proto-Elamite would enrich the story of human technological development. In particular, the unsettled question of whether, and the extent to which, proto-Elamite developed the use of signs explicitly for the sounds of language leaves a significant gap in the history of human information technologies, and it is one of several reasons why this decipherment puzzle deserves our attention.

1.2 A Century of Proto-Elamite Studies

Clay tablets inscribed with an unknown script began appearing in modern French excavations at Susa in southwestern Iran around 1900. Although it was clear that this new script was among the earliest ever discovered, for many decades it did not ignite much study. Proto-Elamite remains largely undeciphered today. We will explore throughout this Element what it means for a script to be ‘partially deciphered’. Most of all, this Element hopes to demonstrate that significant new insights can still come from this unique corpus and that proto-Elamite is of great interest both for what it can tell us about early Iranian societies, including the dynamic interactions between groups of people in and around Iran in the late fourth millennium BCE, and for the history of writing and symbol systems.

The epigraphist of the early excavations at Susa, Father Vincent Scheil (Reference Scheil1905), referred to the script as ‘proto-Elamite’ since it apparently belonged to an era prior to the third millennium BCE Elamite cultural power at Susa. He understood that this new writing system was very early, but the relationship between proto-Elamite and the earliest cuneiform writing in neighbouring Iraq would only start to be clarified some decades later, as proto-cuneiform tablets from Iraq began to be published and studied (Englund Reference Englund, Attinger and Wäfler1998: 22–49). Scheil noted that tablets were often found along with jar stoppers and sealing fragments, remains of product storage management, and he recognised that all documents were economic records. He identified the largely ideographic nature of the system, in which signs stood for objects or associated concepts. At first, he suggested that the tablets were strictly ideographic, but later he suggested that limited ‘phonetic’ uses of signs might have crept into more advanced stages of the writing system, where one finds longer sequences of signs. This has remained the standard hypothesis today (Section 5.6).

Scheil pessimistically concluded that ‘it is unfortunately doubtful that new excavations will ever deliver the keys to the problems posed by proto-Elamite’ (Reference Scheil1923: iv). Very few scholars have set to work on proto-Elamite in the intervening century. To demonstrate the remarkable neglect of proto-Elamite research, we need only point out that one of its longest surviving written documents (Figure 1) has never been published in drawing or subjected to study.Footnote ¹ Yet those few intrepid scholars who have been willing to approach this supposedly intractable problem, particularly since the 1970s, have made considerable advances. Improved documentation of the corpus, including images, drawings, and transliterations, while still in progress, has now poised the field for considerable new breakthroughs. As recently as 2012, joins of tablet fragments were still being identified in the Louvre (Dahl Reference Dahl2005b, Reference Dahl2012b).

The success of decipherment efforts also depends on whether the questions that are asked align with the nature of the material being studied. The breakthroughs that we might make in understanding proto-Elamite may not represent ‘decipherment’ in a classical linguistic sense if the texts do not contain much or any linguistic coding (Damerow Reference Damerow2006). Nonetheless, I hope this Element shows that the script’s emphasis on ideography does not detract from its potential as a source of information on proto-Elamite society. Proto-Elamite writing offers intimate glimpses into a proto-literate experiment in social organisation, the blueprint for which is left on the tablets for us to decipher.

Scheil’s pessimism about the potential of future excavations to help us understand the writing system was misplaced in some important ways. Part of the reason that proto-Elamite tablets are such a rich source of information on the society that made them is that the inscribed symbols are only one dimension by which they carry information: tablets often bear seal impressions, as in Figure 1, linking some tablets to each other and potentially to administrative practices of sealing containers and doors. Tablets also bear archival marks, fingerprints, and clay chemical signals, all of which can be studied to reveal who was writing those tablets. Future finds of tablets in situ or in well-defined trash areas could furnish us with a wealth of new information about practices of writing and disposing of tablets.

Furthermore, over the course of the twentieth century, new dimensions of interpretation have developed, as tablets in this writing system have subsequently emerged in small numbers at sites in areas of Iran far from Susa (Figure 2). Proto-Elamite takes on a new significance as a symbolic tool common to groups of people who were active in settlements many hundreds of kilometres from each other and in different ecological settings. Today, at least 620 proto-Elamite tablets from Susa and other sites are housed in the National Museum of Iran, while over 1,000 more are in the Louvre and a handful in other collections (Dahl Reference Dahl, Petrie, Potts and Petrie2013: 238, Reference Dahl2019: 59–60).

Figure 2

Selected sites of the proto-Elamite world.

Map by N. Erskine.

2.1 Administrative Precursors to Writing

In comparison to other regions of the world, writing in southwest Asia has a relatively clearly documented prehistory, thanks to the regular use of clay for a set of interrelated accounting technologies: counters or tokens, seals (usually of stone) carved with designs, and lumps of clay that could be impressed by these seals to secure containers or doors. These technologies are found from Türkiye and Syria in the north and west to Iraq and Iran in the southeast, and they have a deep history stretching back through the Neolithic.

Figure 3

Clay administrative objects from Susa. A: Hollow clay ball filled with tokens (Sb 1927). B: A clay ‘tag’ with stylistic parallel from Uruk (Sb 4985). C: ‘Complex’ tokens, some in the form of vessels (Sb 23573).

Images: © GrandPalaisRmn (musée du Louvre)/Raphaël Chipault (A), Stéphane Maréchalle (B), Thierry Ollivier (C).

Administrative technologies changed significantly during the fourth millennium BCE in the lead-up to the invention of writing. The numbers of tokens increased, and there was some standardisation of shapes. Numerous types of ‘decorated tokens’ were introduced, but their geographic spread was less wide than that of plain tokens. Susa produced an especially rich corpus of both plain and decorated geometric tokens and simple iconic forms such as vessels or animals (Amiet Reference Amiet1972: plate 61 460bis; Schmandt-Besserat Reference Schmandt-Besserat, Álvarez-Mon, Basello and Wicks2018; also at Chogha Mish, Delougaz & Kantor Reference Delougaz and Kantor1996: 125) (Figure 3C).

A new shape of seal – cylindrical for rolling rather than flat for stamping – was introduced around the middle of the millennium. In late prehistory, tokens began to be encased in lumps of clay whose surfaces could be marked by seals and by impressing tokens themselves, a practice that rendered redundant the use of actual tokens for this new accounting method (Figure 3A). Around the same time, the first tablets were created – rectangular slabs of clay with impressions of tokens or a stylus imitating tokens to represent numbers, and sometimes with impressions of seals. These numerical notations are the first signs of writing. A recent study based on a large database of artefacts from across Iran concluded that ‘there is a clear step-change in the volume and complexity of evidence for bureaucratic activity through the course of the Chalcolithic period in Iran, which we can collectively characterise as signifying an information revolution’ (Matthews et al. Reference Matthews, Richardson, Fazeli Nashli and de Groene2025: 18).

Perhaps shortly after numerical tablets were introduced, scribes began inventing one or two non-numerical signs to add to their tablets. While most of the technologies just described had a relatively wide geographic distribution, these numero-ideographic tablets have so far been found only in Uruk in southern Iraq, Susa in southwestern Iran, Godin Tepe in the central Zagros mountains, and possibly a single example at Arslantepe in southeastern Türkiye.Footnote ²

D. Schmandt-Besserat (Reference Schmandt-Besserat1992) argues that tokens are direct precursors to writing. This is certainly true for the numerical notations in both proto-cuneiform and proto-Elamite, whose shapes and even some rules of use show clear relationships with impressions on the late pre-literate numerical tablets (Englund Reference Englund, Yushu and Yiyi2006). It is more difficult to show that either plain or complex tokens influenced the invention of non-numerical signs. In fact, proto-writing clearly represents the coming together of tokens with seal technologies – which encoded information about ownership or products – alongside significantly new forms of symbolism. Similarities between seal imagery and signs for social or administrative identities in both proto-cuneiform and proto-Elamite writing can be found, although their significance to the overall projects of script invention has yet to be weighed (Pittman Reference 109Pittman1994; Kelley Reference Kelley, Cartolano and Ferrara2024; Kelley, Cartolano, and Ferrara Reference Kelley, Cartolano and Ferrara2024).

It is worth emphasising that all information in proto-Elamite and proto-cuneiform is set in relation to the numerical notations: numeracy is absolutely central to the invention of writing in southwest Asia. A rare example of a proto-literate symbol used without explicit connection to a numerical notation is the clay tag shown in Figure 3B.

It remains difficult to provide a clear picture of the physical and social settings in which pre-literate accounting tools were used. At Chogha Mish, about 15 kilometres east of Susa, clay balls and numerical tablets were found in the lower town, especially in pits associated with domestic buildings (Delougaz & Kantor Reference Delougaz and Kantor1996; Wright Reference Wright, Feinman and Marcus1998) as well as in a possible storage room associated with a monumental building (Alizadeh Reference 99Alizadeh2008: 79), while at Susa, controlled excavations on the Acropolis uncovered domestic areas where sealed bullae and numerical tablets were found (Le Brun & Vallat Reference Le Brun and Vallat1978). The wide synthesis of clay administrative materials in Iran conducted by R. Matthews et al. (Reference Matthews, Richardson, Fazeli Nashli and de Groene2025) highlighted that suites of pre-literate administrative devices are associated with craft activities in numerous sites.

2.2 Contact and Divergence between Iran and Southern Iraq

The administrative precursors to writing discussed so far have been presented as essentially local developments, but the traditional story of the invention of writing in Iran involves an important interloper. The city of Uruk in southern Iraq was on an explosive path of growth that had begun in the early fourth millennium and culminated in an approximately 250-hectare settlement by the beginning of the third millennium (compare Susa’s 10–25 hectares), sitting atop a four-tiered regional settlement hierarchy (Adams Reference Adams1981). An impressive range of monumental buildings dating to the mid-to-late fourth millennium have been excavated, and numerical tablets, sealings, and seal-impressed clay balls have been found, but their chronological placement is difficult – they are attributed to Uruk V and perhaps IVb phases, roughly corresponding to the late pre-literate administrative artefacts from Susa II/Acropolis level 20–18. Uruk itself has been seen as a driver of innovation in administrative technologies that led to writing (Algaze Reference Algaze2005).

Yet in the fourth millennium BCE, sites in Iran, especially Susa, have revealed some of the richest corpora of all the aforementioned accounting devices. However, these new late fourth-millennium technologies were also accompanied by ‘Uruk-related’ ceramics and architectural influence at sites in Iran, northern Iraq, Syria, and Türkiye, leading to a characterisation of all of these objects as markers of southern Mesopotamian presence in other regions. As argued by G. Algaze (Reference Algaze1989, Reference Algaze2005), Urukeans may have established colonies and outposts in regions that would help them secure valuable resources – including stone, metal, and wood – that were lacking in lowland Iraq. Algaze’s work on the ‘Uruk Expansion’ or ‘World System’ (Algaze Reference Algaze2005), also termed the ‘Uruk Phenomenon’ (Collins Reference Collins2000), sparked decades of debates: some archaeologists have responded by suggesting that Algaze’s model overlooks significant local developments in the so-called peripheral regions and that it may overemphasise the need for the city of Uruk to exert control over distant regions in order to secure access to goods that were historically obtained through down-the-line trade, targeted expeditions, and booty (Stein Reference Stein1999; Butterlin Reference 101Butterlin2003; Englund Reference Englund, Yushu and Yiyi2006). The nature of Uruk’s links in terms of political, economic, demographic, and cultural dynamics continues to be debated, and new excavations may add fresh evidence.

Susa was a gateway to the Zagros, the Iranian plateau, and beyond to sources of stones and metals. Nearer resources, such as those of the Deh Luran plain (chert, bitumen, goat hair products, and wood), would also have been valued by Urukeans (Wright Reference Wright, Feinman and Marcus1998). During the mid fourth millennium, Susa was one of the most closely connected sites to Uruk, with ceramics showing clear affinities. Algaze spoke of ‘outright colonization’ (Reference Algaze2005: 11) of Susiana by people from Uruk in the centuries before the proto-Elamite era, but while regional settlement patterns and population estimates indicate movements between southern Iraq and Susiana in the late pre-literate/Susa II period (Hopper and Wilkinson Reference Hopper, Wilkinson and Petrie2013), continuity with earlier material culture in Susiana speaks against population replacement by mass migration from southern Mesopotamia into western Iran. The regions were likely linked by the movement of ‘traders, craft specialists, herders, soldiers, or refugees’ (Wright Reference Wright, Feinman and Marcus1998). Coarse, easily made bevel-rim bowls, found extensively in both regions, were for many years interpreted as representing the ‘spread’ of Uruk-related cultures of élite control over local labour, however D. T. Potts (Reference Potts2009) questions whether we should instead see them as evidence for more widely shared popular culinary technologies, perhaps a new taste for leavened bread (but cf. Section 5.3.2).

But this does not seem to be the whole story. Glyptic imagery from Susa, nearby Chogha Mish, and Uruk in this period includes a distinctive bearded male figure that has been interpreted as the precursor to the later-known Sumerian authority figure called the En. Although the meaning of the figure at Susa and Chogha Mish is unknown, it is striking that alongside regional preferences in seal styles (Pittman Reference Pittman and Petrie2013) western Iran and Uruk shared some imagery of political authority. Overall, the archaeological evidence suggests significant two-way engagement between Lower Mesopotamia and Susa, rather than the colonisation of one area by the other.

The highly complex proto-cuneiform system, which used over 380 ideographic signs already in its earliest phase (Uruk IVa),Footnote ³ is likely to have preceded, and certainly influenced, proto-Elamite scribal practice. This conclusion is supported by numerous subtle textual clues (e.g. Damerow & Englund Reference Damerow and Englund1989: 28; Dahl Reference Dahl2025). There are extensive – if often masked – connections not only between the numerical systems but also bookkeeping techniques and sign inventories which prove that early proto-Elamite scribes were in contact with well-developed proto-cuneiform scribal practices, that is after the shift from numerical tablets to the invention of the distinctive proto-cuneiform and proto-Elamite scripts.

At Uruk, bookkeeping became more complex still around the close of the fourth millennium, with the Uruk III script phase of the Jemdet Nasr period, broadly contemporary with proto-Elamite. At this point, proto-cuneiform is found in other cities in Iraq. Scribes were able to establish durable chains of knowledge transmission, which implies that scribal practice was embedded in powerful institutions. This is evidenced especially by the crystallisation of a conservative series of ‘lexical’ compositions, launching a stream of tradition that was passed on for the following 3,000 years.

Uruk’s fourth millennium scale and the take-off of proto-cuneiform at the very end of the fourth millennium remain powerful clues that dramatic changes were taking place in southern Iraqi societies that were linked to new information technologies. However, this does not imply that the leap in symbol system complexity was driven exclusively by Urukean dynamics. Local developments in administrative devices, which are so richly documented at Susa, show that it too was an innovator and centre of inter-regional influence alongside Uruk through at least part of the lead-up to the invention of writing (Butterlin Reference 101Butterlin2003; Pittman Reference Pittman and Petrie2013). Excavations on Susa’s Acropolis have produced the clearest stratigraphic sequence demonstrating the introduction of hollow clay balls and numerical tablets, followed by proto-Elamite writing (Le Brun Reference Le Brun1971). At Uruk, most numerical tablets assigned to the Uruk V (late pre-literate) phase are in a rectangular shape that typologically seems to post-date the quadrangular rounded-corner tablets found together with the impressed hollow clay balls at Susa and other so-called peripheral sites of the Uruk network (Butterlin Reference 101Butterlin2003: 85–90). It appears that no numeral-impressed clay balls (considered a key developmental step) are known from Uruk itself. Either the parts of Uruk where the earliest transition to tablet-making occurred have not been documented or it took place differently there than in Susa.Footnote ⁴

It is thus hardly clear that Uruk itself was the sole driver and exporter of information technologies in the late pre-literate period. Indeed, Susa’s importance in the network of Uruk-influenced sites in northern Mesopotamia may be illustrated by chemical analysis, which has revealed that some clay sealings and a seal-impressed numerical tablet from the Late Uruk site of Hacinebi in Türkiye, at the far reach of the Uruk network, may have originated in Susa (Blackman Reference Blackman1999). Studying the early seal imagery from Uruk, R. M. Boehmer (Reference Boehmer1999) raised the possibility that clay balls and cylinder seals were technologies introduced to Uruk from western Iran, while H. Pittman (Reference Pittman and Petrie2013) further emphasises the western Iranian origins of some of the wider Uruk-network seal imagery.

Susa’s position as an exporter of Uruk-style administrative practices across Iran has also been suggested in relation to the corpus of forty-three numerical tablets (perhaps four of which are numero-ideographic) found at Godin Tepe in the Central Zagros of western Iran. These seem to belong to a pivotal point in the development of writing and in the relationship between Urukean and Susian administrators. C. Petrie (Reference Petrie, McMahon and Crawford2014) re-articulated a case for understanding the tablets found in level IV:1 from Godin Tepe as representing Susian-based administrative influence during an ‘early proto-Elamite’ phase that also brought tablets to Tepe Sialk (level IV:1) on the Iranian plateau just prior to the introduction of the proto-Elamite sign system there, and equivalent to the transitional phase 17–17X at Susa. This opinion has been echoed by a study of pottery forms (Renette and Ghasrian Reference Renette and Ghasrian2020). Petrie (Reference Petrie, McMahon and Crawford2014: 151) thus attributes part of the origins of proto-Elamite writing to a situation in which ‘from early Susa II, much of the influence from or contact between Mesopotamia and highland Iran may have gone through a Susian filter’.

The numero-ideographic tablets found at Susa and Godin Tepe both find very close parallels in document shape to examples from Uruk, and a tall vessel-shaped sign with a handle is identical to later proto-cuneiform signs but is not closely paralleled in proto-Elamite. One interpretation is that the intentional move away from scribal practice and symbol use that was, until then, shared by some groups in Uruk and Susa had yet to emerge among these (proto-)proto-Elamites. A similarly direct line from some late pre-literate seal imagery into proto-cuneiform can be seen – such as depictions of distinctive looped cultic poles, found on seals at several Uruk-related sites, including Susa but also as far as Jebel Aruda in northern Syria (Kelley, Cartolano, and Ferrara 2025); these shapes are not identifiable in proto-Elamite.

Conversely, we can also find some continuity from late pre-literate administrators of Iran into the following proto-Elamite writing system, for example in a regionally specific tablet shape: elongated forms which appear at several sites, including probably just prior to the introduction of proto-Elamite at Tepe Sialk (Figure 4). Elongated tablets continue in proto-Elamite writing but have no good proto-cuneiform parallels. Moreover, some pre-literate tablets and tally-slabs from Iran have numerical markings on their edges, a practice commonly found in proto-Elamite but not in proto-cuneiform.

Figure 4

Some early tablet shapes and features. A: Sb 6289 (Louvre)/MDP 43 no. 534. B: Sb 5874 (Louvre)/MDP 43 no. 602. C: Delougaz & Kantor (Reference Delougaz and Kantor1996: plate 132). D: Sb 15068 (Louvre)/MDP 17, 113. E: MDP 17, 113. F: MDP 17, 89. G: Alizadeh (Reference Alizadeh2014: fig. 87). Author’s drawings except C; seal art after cited publications.

Figure 4 Long description

Drawings of six clay tablets of different shapes, with seal impressions, numerical notation impressions, and in three tablets, one or a few non-numerical signs. An especially elongated tablet (D) also shows an unusual ‘doodle’, which cannot be assigned to the proto-Elamite sign list. A clay ‘tally slab’ from Choga Mish is a similar object to these tablets, but narrower in shape. It, too, bears crescent-shaped impressions that may be numerical notations, but on its thin edge rather than flat surface. Altogether the tablet groups show the development from late pre-historic technologies (A–D) to proto-literate (proto-Elamite) technologies (E–G).

2.3 Proto-Elamite

Despite their entangled origins, proto-cuneiform and proto-Elamite from their outset became mutually exclusive markers of Uruk and proto-Elamite administrative spheres. Writing developed in both Uruk and Susa upon the breakup of the supra-regional networks of the mid fourth millennium. Perhaps a new scarcity in resources contributed to the invention of proto-cuneiform writing as a tool to micro-manage goods and personnel in a more disconnected Uruk (Dahl Reference Dahl2025). Proto-cuneiform writing appears only in southern/central lowland Iraq, while proto-Elamite writing continues the late pre-literate pattern of connecting geographically distant sites.

Prior to the invention of proto-Elamite, the material culture at several sites on Iran’s highland plateau indicates either the presence of people from lowland Iran and/or the Late Uruk network (e.g. from Iraq through to Syria) or at least contact with them. These sites were situated along routes by which resources, including stone and metal, could have been brought to western Iran and Mesopotamia. During the proto-Elamite period these sites further transformed in ways that have been described as local ‘emulation’ of a model of social organisation and resource administration introduced from the lowlanders (Helwing Reference Helwing, Nokandeh, Curtis and Pic2019). Excavations at several sites in Iran have identified periods of abandonment, realignment of architecture, or the introduction of new people at sites where proto-Elamite is introduced (Lamberg-Karlovsky Reference Lamberg-Karlovsky1978).

At Susa, a small exposure of the Acropolis in the controlled excavations (about 75 square metres) revealed a thick layer of greenish ash marking the transition to a new phase on the Acropolis, where the first proto-Elamite tablets then appear in level 16 (or ‘17ax’), but it is difficult to confirm whether there was a significant abandonment of Susa between levels 17 and 16 (Le Brun Reference Le Brun and Meyer2019; Matthews & Fazeli Nashli Reference Matthews and Fazeli Nashli2022: 192–194). Susa’s ceramics begin to show closer connections to other sites in the Zagros and the highlands, including Tal-e Malyan to the southeast; overall, Iranian assemblages demonstrate a schism between Mesopotamia and Iran (Le Brun Reference Le Brun and Meyer2019; Matthews & Fazeli Nashli Reference Matthews and Fazeli Nashli2022: 194).

Scribal activity was centred on Susa, where at least 1,600 proto-Elamite tablets have been found, but small numbers of tablets have also been found at sites many hundreds of kilometres away (Figure 2). These tablets are associated with a highly distinctive set of proto-Elamite seal styles found impressed on tablets and on lumps of clay used to seal containers and doors. Both proto-Elamite writing and sealing define a clear chronological phase that can be easily distinguished from what precedes and what follows at sites across Iran.

2.4 Script Invention in Its Iranian Context

Throughout the twentieth century, the archaeology of early Iran has often been analysed through a filter of its western neighbour Mesopotamia (Petrie Reference Petrie and Petrie2013; Alizadeh Reference Alizadeh and van Ess2021). The invention of proto-Elamite and its spread across Iran are no exceptions, having been described as an echo of the cultural model of the Uruk Phenomenon, a ‘social experiment’ (Lamberg-Karlovsky Reference 106Lamberg-Karlovsky, Damerow and Englund1989: x) which may have, like the model proposed for Uruk, involved administrators (from Susa?) establishing a presence at strategic locations with an eye to securing trade. The mid fourth-millennium connections just described remain a crucial piece of the puzzle, but this should be paired with research into regional developments in their own terms. The state of decipherment of proto-Elamite has made it difficult so far to dive broadly into differences in the way writing was used in the proto-cuneiform and proto-Elamite worlds, but this is a research area with much future potential.

Although most of the numerical systems in proto-cuneiform and proto-Elamite are shared (Section 5.3), only a few dozen of the many hundreds of non-numerical signs in each system can be shown to be related. More ‘schematic’ sign forms of proto-Elamite may sometimes mask iconic relationships, but the intentional separation of the scripts is clear. They also mark clear geographic boundaries, with no site having turned up both proto-cuneiform and proto-Elamite tablets despite their chronological overlap. At first glance one can see the difference between the scripts because proto-Elamite scribes wrote their signs exclusively in straight lines, in contrast to proto-cuneiform’s systems of boxy cases and sub-cases with a non-linear spatial arrangement of signs within cases (perhaps in U-shapes; see Dahl Reference Dahl2025: 306).

If we were dealing with a fully developed writing system – that is, heavily invested in communicating through recording the sounds of language – it would be natural to think that the writing system differences at Uruk and Susa were stimulated by different dominant languages. But in the case of proto-writing we may look to a more general divergence in culture that made the sharing of a socially embedded symbol system unacceptable, such as differences in religion, political expression, and social and economic organisation. The varied geographic settings at which proto-Elamite has been found (Section 3) contrast with the lowland distribution of proto-cuneiform. Moreover, the (as yet contentious) possibility that mobile groups were a significant social force in the proto-Elamite world may set the Iranian invention of writing apart (Section 2.4.1). Daneshmand (Reference Daneshmand2024) introduced another important possibility, that the phenomenon of schismogenesis – intentional cultural differentiation from one’s neighbours – may also have shaped the use of writing in Iran from the proto-Elamite period and onwards. The history of writing in Iran for the next 3,000 years was very different from its western neighbours.

Looking deeper into the past, Stein (Reference Stein and Restelli2020) argues that leadership strategies in Susa in the late fifth and early fourth millennia differed from both northern and southern Mesopotamian neighbours in emphasising public ritual associated with monumental constructions and in greater reliance on a ‘prestige goods economy’ (e.g. rich finds at Susa of copper coming from the Anarak area of central Iran) than on staple finance such as the irrigation-based agricultural surplus of southern Mesopotamia. Nonetheless, a granary atop a huge mudbrick platform (80 metres per side) that may have hosted rituals at Susa suggests the enduring importance of the management of agricultural produce among emerging elites.

The Susa I period (c. 4000–3500 BCE) also produced a distinctive kind of finely painted ceramics, many from a very large structure filled with graves referred to as the massif funéraire, which remains exceedingly poorly understood (Álvarez-Mon Reference Álvarez-Mon2018) (Figure 5A). F. Hole argued that ‘Individuality is the hallmark of the painted vessels …they were made to be different, although all strictly follow local canons of composition, layout, and the use of motifs’ (Reference Hole, Harper, Aruz and Tallon1992: 29), and for painted open bowls he describes a ‘grammar’ to the combinations of images (Reference 105Hole2010).

Although distant in Susa’s past by the time of proto-Elamite, a comparison of a Susa I vessel, later fourth-millennium vessels, and proto-Elamite seal imagery and signs illustrates some long-term stylistic continuities. A common motif shows the emphasised curved horns of a bearded caprid (Ovis orientalis?) enclosing or adjacent to geometric shapes such as triangles and a cross (Figure 5). These motifs are also combined in proto-Elamite script in schematic form, true to the script’s aesthetic, in a ‘household’ sign depicting a curved horn inside a cross (Figure 5E). Comparisons over vast periods of time are not a sound way to read meaning into images, but they can help to place proto-Elamite administrative imagery in its longer-term Iranian streams of tradition. The adaptation of local and regional traditions may have shaped proto-Elamite both outwardly and, potentially, in its very mechanics – such as how symbols were conceived of in script as representations of social power – into a communication system that developed in a distinct direction from its proto-cuneiform neighbour.

Figure 5

A: Vessel from Susa, Susa I period, Sb 3174. B: Vessel from Tepe Sialk c. 3700–3400 BCE, Vidale, Fazeli Nashli & Desset (Reference Vidale, Fazeli Nashli, Desset and Meller2018: fig. 6), photograph by N. H. Tehrani (National Museum of Iran). C: Vessel from Tepe Yahya period IVB, Mutin (Reference Mutin2013: fig. 3.102). D: Tablet with seal impression MDP 6, 377/P008158. E: Proto-Elamite signs, shown in their original orientation for comparison with seal motifs.

Figure 5 Long description

A: A tall buff-and-black beaker with painted geometric designs, with a central motif of a standing bearded goat with emphasised horns and a circle-and-plant motif inside the curve of the horns; above, dogs encircle the vase. B: A buff-and-black cup with geometric designs and bearded goats with accentuated curved horns in file circling the vase; a fat cross is placed inside the goat horns. C: Drawing of a painted sherd with a goat with emphasised horns and a triangle on its back. D: Drawing and photo of a seal impression on a proto-Elamite tablet showing bearded goats with accentuated horns walking in profile, with a plant-like shape placed inside the goat horns and a ‘mountain’ or mound below the goats. E: Three proto-Elamite signs whose shapes echo the images in A–F. F: A cylinder seal and its modern roll-out, showing two bearded goats with accentuated curved horns rearing against a mountain, with ‘crosses’ in field.

All proto-Elamite sign images in this Element courtesy of J. L. Dahl. F. Heulandite seal and modern impression, Sb 2675. A, D, F.Images © GrandPalaisRmn (musée du Louvre)/GrandPalaisRmn (A), Thierry Ollivier (D, F). National Museum of Iran / Reproduced from Vidale, Fazeli Nashli, and Desset 2018 fig. 6 (B).

3.1 Susa

Susa was a regional power for several millennia, during which time it alternated in political and cultural alignment (Amiet Reference Amiet1979). To the west, probably across marshes which have since receded, were the southern Mesopotamian lowlands where dense networks of urban literate societies developed along the rivers, while to the north, south, and east were the worlds of the Zagros mountain range that stretches 1,600 kilometres northwest to southeast, and through mountain passes to towns in intermontane valleys and onto the inhabited edges of the Iranian plateau. At Susa and elsewhere, the ‘vertical integration’ of populations from plains to mountains, especially in relation to seasonal animal herding, has emerged as a major factor shaping its complex societies.

Susiana, along with the nearby Deh Luran and Ram Hormuz plains in southwestern Iran, forms a unique ‘ecotone’ at the junction of different ecosystems with access to lowland Mesopotamia, the southern Persian Gulf, and the mountains and highlands to the north and east, offering ‘vast resources of wool, stone, wood, bitumen, tree fruits, metal ores, gypsum’ and more (Moghaddam Reference Moghaddam and Potts2013: 106). Extensive coverage of the small thorny jujube tree, tamarisk, and others provided fuel, and marshes to the south(west) were rich in birdlife, fish, and plant fibres. People hunted herds of gazelle, wild onagers, and other animals.

The earliest founding of Susa remains uncertain, perhaps 4700–4500 BCE. Two large mudbrick constructions and finds, including copper objects, finely painted pottery, and seals depicting what may be ritual leaders, illustrate Susa as a place of regional importance. After a collapse of these structures in the early fourth millennium (Hole Reference 105Hole2010), the following ‘Susa II’ era shows a reorganisation of architecture and pottery that reveals new connections to southern Iraq where Uruk was thriving (Potts Reference Potts2016: 55) (Section 2.2). Susa grew to 25 hectares and became a leader in the development of administrative technologies. It interacted with a network of smaller sites in the Susiana plain, including a possible rival, Chogha Mish, which lay about 60 kilometres east. It also appears to have cultivated longer-distance ties, especially northwards and onto the plateau (Alizadeh, Aghili & Sarlak Reference Alizadeh, Aghili and Sarlak2015).

Yet by the time proto-Elamite writing was invented at the end of the fourth millennium – the ‘Susa III period’ – Susa’s occupation might have shrunk by half and regional settlement may have decreased (Alden Reference Alden1982: 617; cf. Zalaghi Reference Zalaghi and Meyer2019). Chogha Mish was abandoned. At Susa, the first proto-Elamite tablets appear in level 16 (or an ephemeral level ‘17ax’) in the important area called the Acropolis, while the latest tablets are found in level 14B (Le Brun Reference Le Brun1971). Although some continuities in architectural layout have been highlighted (Steve & Gasche Reference 111Steve and Gasche1971; Dahl, Petrie & Potts Reference Dahl, Petrie, Potts and Petrie2013; Álvarez-Mon Reference Álvarez-Mon2020: 59), A. Le Brun (Reference Le Brun and Meyer2019) describes a clear shift in the material culture with the introduction of proto-Elamite, especially in pottery styles which indicate a schism between Mesopotamia and Susa in this period, while connections between Susa and other Iranian sites, including Tal-e Malyan (see later) grew. That is, proto-Elamite was a ‘highland’-facing era at Susa rather than the previous ‘Mesopotamian’-facing one.

Early excavation practices at Susa have left us with a tragically impoverished documentation of proto-Elamite architectural landscapes and the origins of tablets. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European excavators were attracted to sites like Susa by nationalist competition, romantic notions of recovering ancient glories to showcase in museums, and developing interests in the ‘evolution’ of human societies (Dyson Reference Dyson1968; Abdi Reference Abdi2008; Crouzet & Miller Reference Crouzet and Miller2025). The early French excavators moved large amounts of earth while failing to adopt methods suitable for identifying and recording the site’s ubiquitous mudbrick architecture (Cuny & Paladre Reference Cuny and Paladre2023).

Scheil (Reference Scheil1923: I) recounted that tablets at Susa had been found in a few large lots in 1901 and 1907, but later controlled excavations found tablets scattered in small numbers. Some of these seem closely related to earlier finds: one even has the same scribal signature as a tablet found earlier (Dahl Reference Dahl2005a: 106). Tablets published in subsequent volumes of the Mémoires of the French archaeological mission are attributable to different, if only crudely locatable, excavated areas of Susa’s Acropolis, and they reflect several different archives, in the loose sense of the word.

Later small-scale excavations on the Acropolis aimed at clarifying the stratigraphy of Susa uncovered only twenty-three tablets (many of them fragmentary) between levels 17 and 14B amidst a series of domestic buildings (Le Brun & Vallat Reference Le Brun and Vallat1978). Apart from this limited proto-Elamite domestic exposure, excavations revealed that some additions had been made to the older High Terrace platform with the construction of a recessed wall and regular-sized ‘Reimchen’ (Mesopotamian style) bricks. Two standard proto-Elamite tablets came from this area (Steve & Gasche Reference 111Steve and Gasche1971: 12).

3.2 Tepe Sialk

Tepe Sialk is located in western central Iran. It may have been, like its neighbour Arisman, an important copper-working site drawing on local copper sources. Moulds for axe heads like those known in Susa were found at both sites. Sialk was excavated in the 1930s and played an important part in establishing the idea that settlements on the Iranian plateau were colonised by or hosted outposts for lowland Urukeans or Susians during the mid fourth millennium BCE (Sialk period III_6–7). A long-held view is that this stimulated the rise of the following proto-Elamite phenomenon as a process of ‘secondary state formation’ involving local emulation of a social model originating in the Uruk world (Helwing Reference Helwing, Nokandeh, Curtis and Pic2019).

Numerical tablets were found in level IV_a, which can be correlated with the Susa II period. The following proto-Elamite level (IV₂) was not well intact; more recent excavations noted significant caves dug into the mound by modern locals for storage and animal shelter prior to the 1930s excavations (Helwing Reference Helwing, Nokandeh, Curtis and Pic2019). Seven tablets appear to be proto-Elamite, at least one of which (S.28, a tally of sheep and goats) was found along with bevel-rim bowls (Dahl, Petrie & Potts Reference Dahl, Petrie, Potts and Petrie2013: 357). R. Matthews and H. Fazeli Nashli (Reference Matthews and Fazeli Nashli2022: 27) offer a historical sketch of late fourth millennium Sialk based on current evidence: ‘the destruction by fire of a local culture at the end of Sialk III, the implantation of a Late Uruk/Late Susa II colony on the summit of Sialk South, analogous to Godin VI:1 (Section 2.2), and its succession by a Proto-Elamite presence in Sialk IV₂ followed by a significant period of abandonment’.

3.3 Tal-e Geser

A single, simple proto-Elamite tablet (Figure 4G) was excavated at Tal-e Geser (or Ghazir) in the Ram Hormuz plain just southeast of Susiana in 1948/49. Excavated proto-Elamite architecture includes part of an ‘imposing building’, but the single proto-Elamite tablet was found in an archaeological level of a much later period. Despite the regional importance and longevity of this site, excavation produced little administrative material from any period (Alizadeh Reference Alizadeh2014: 45/fig. 87: E). Instrumental neutron activation analysis suggests that jars at Tal-e Malyan may have come from Geser, perhaps shipping products such as oil or dates (Alden, Minc & Alizadeh Reference Alden, Minc, Alizadeh and Alizadeh2014; Matthews & Fazeli Nashli Reference Matthews and Fazeli Nashli2022: 205).

3.4 Shahr-e Sokhta

The furthest eastern reach of the writing system so far, the site of Shahr-e Sokhta sits en route to valuable minerals in Central Asia, and some of its ceramics show cultural connections east into Pakistan (Mutin Reference Mutin2013: 202). One tablet was found in 1975 along with seals, sealings, and ceramics in a cut below a residential area (Amiet & Tosi Reference Amiet and Tosi1978: 24). The tablet has two damaged ideograms and a standard proto-Elamite numerical notation. Another large tablet with unusual rectangular impressions and rolled with a seal (Sajjadi & Moradi Reference Sajjadi and Moradi2022: fig. 7) is not proto-Elamite and might date to period IV (c. 2450–2000 BCE) based on associated pottery; it doesn’t seem to be a plausible administrative document in the Iranian and Mesopotamian sense (there are no inscribed signs and the possible ‘numerical impressions’ are evenly spaced over the preserved surface), and without parallels its interpretation remains uncertain.

3.5 Tepe Yahya

The proto-Elamite period at Tepe Yahya is known from partial exposure (over 500 square metres) of a large mudbrick building in period IVC that Potts (Reference Potts2001: 1) described as ‘unlike any that preceded or followed it’, with standardised bricks and rooms measured according to a plan that suggest construction technique parallels as far as Syria and southern Iraq (Beale and Carter Reference 100Beale and Carter1983). This building was constructed on a levelling platform following a gap in occupation at the site of uncertain length.

During excavations in the 1970s, tablets were found scattered on floors and in debris of the building in different rooms and outdoor spaces. Seal impressions of the distinctive proto-Elamite styles known from Susa and other sites were also found on lumps of clay used to seal doors and containers (Pittman Reference Pittman and Potts2001). B. Mutin (Reference Mutin2013: 194–195/fig. 4.29) interpreted the building as a residence for fifteen to twenty ‘extended families’ engaged in the management, processing, storing, and redistribution of foodstuffs and craft activities involving both local and distant resources such as copper, shell, obsidian, and semi-precious stones from Türkiye, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Persian Gulf. The wide range of technologies and materials contributes to the impression that the ‘proto-Elamites’ at Tepe Yahya were recent migrants to the area who were ‘well-connected with peoples from separate cultural spheres … [and who] developed important connections with their local neighbours’. Almost all of the twenty-seven texts from Tepe Yahya are simple records of agricultural work and grain with limited use of ideograms.

Lamberg-Karlovsky (Reference 106Lamberg-Karlovsky, Damerow and Englund1989: vi) suggested that the building was in use for not more than a century and that it was perhaps only seasonally occupied by people who may also have ties to the Halil Rud river valley. Recent archaeological work in that region has begun clarifying its fourth-millennium occupation, unfortunately following major looting which brought to light the area’s importance during the third millennium BCE (Majidzadeh Reference Majidzadeh2008; Vidale & Desset Reference Vidale, Desset and Petrie2013). Lamberg-Karlovsky also concluded that ‘the abundant materials, seemingly of high value, left upon the floors of the building suggest a sudden abandonment of the building complex’. Or was it a seasonal, routine departure, in which ‘a part of the population … locked these rooms and their containers and, for some unknown reasons, never returned to the site’ (Mutin Reference Mutin2013: 196)?

3.6 Tal-e Malyan

The site of Tal-e Malyan, the later historical city of ancient Anshan, is located in the Kur river basin of the southern Zagros mountains (Fars province). Inhabitants of Fars were agriculturalists, pastoralists, and craftsmen, with some evidence for specialised ceramic production linking smaller sites to the dominant site of Malyan (Alden Reference Alden and Petrie2013). Later Elamite kings of the second millennium BCE evoked a dual power structure, calling themselves ‘King of Anshan and Susa’, and the material culture connections between Khuzestan (the area of Susa) and Fars in the proto-Elamite era seem to foreshadow this phenomenon.

Malyan was settled a few centuries before the proto-Elamite era, by which time it had grown to about 45 hectares – twice the estimated size of contemporary Susa, which lay roughly 600 kilometres northwest. In regional terminology, this was the Middle Banesh period, a time defined by the introduction of new ceramic styles, including from Susa, which may signal the movement of new groups of people (Mutin Reference Mutin2013: 23–24).

Goat and sheep herding were important (Zeder Reference Zeder1991), and mountain passes provided access to good summer grazing. Some of the world’s earliest evidence for goat domestication, dating to the ninth millennium BCE, has come from this area. N. Miller (Reference Miller1985) infers heavy exploitation and depletion of nearby poplar and juniper forests from the fourth/early third millennium BCE, which she links to activities such as grazing animals and collecting fuel for general domestic and pyrotechnical practices (metallurgy and lime plaster production). The Banesh period in this region experienced a long-term decline in settled population, which has been taken as evidence for increased transhumant pastoralism.

The construction of a 200-hectare encircling wall around Malyan towards the end of the fourth millennium and the labour-intensive production of lime plaster used on the walls of buildings might suggest that a powerful local authority was able to summon considerable seasonal workforces (Blackman Reference Blackman, Wertime and Wertime1982; cf. Sumner Reference Sumner2003: 115), perhaps offering a context for the use of writing to organise personnel and provisioning. Yet Alden (Reference Alden and Petrie2013) envisaged Tal-e Malyan as ‘a place where a handful of tribal lineages lived in a collection of physically separate and more or less independent town-sized settlements’ in which ‘the tribal leaders … independently managed the needs of their separate lineages while also supporting groups of specialists who produced goods and services that could be exchanged within and between lineages as well as between settled and nomadic populations’.

Thirty-two texts and fragments have been recovered from excavations from two different building complexes, mainly as ‘isolated pieces of debris’ (Stolper Reference Stolper1985: 12). Fourteen of these come from an ‘elite’ building in the centre of the mound, area ABC, in which fragments of still vividly coloured wall murals were discovered (Figure 8). These have geometric and floral motifs with clear parallels in proto-Elamite writing, as well as ceramic paintings and perhaps textile designs (Álvarez-Mon Reference Álvarez-Mon2020: 72). The buildings have evidence for cooking and craftwork. Tablets were recovered in trash or other secondary contexts along with seal impressions, many applied to lumps of clay to seal large jars. One tablet was found in the earlier level IV, and the remainder in levels III and II. Seal imagery from level IV suggests its alignment with ‘early proto-Elamite’ as known at Susa, while seals from III and II are almost exclusively in the ‘classic’ style (Pittman Reference Pittman and Sumner2003: 108).

Eighteen tablets, with largely similar features, were found in another part of the site called area TUV (levels II–III), a contemporaneous building complex near the city wall about 900 metres northeast of ABC. At no site have proto-Elamite levels been excavated with a wide horizontal exposure, and this limits our understanding of architecture, town planning, and the distribution of scribal activity. TUV and ABC building complexes at Tal-e Malyan offer important evidence for the use of writing in different ‘households’ within a settlement. Yet the buildings represent less than 0.5 per cent of the estimated 40 hectares of the site’s built extent (Sumner Reference Sumner2003: 113).

Proto-Elamite writing in Malyan lasted at least two generations, broadly contemporary with Susa Acropolis levels 16–14, the latter part of the proto-Elamite period. The handwriting is in some cases ‘sloppy’, but practices mostly conform to those at Susa, and in a few texts complex sign sequences (names?) are found. Unlike proto-Elamite administrators at Susa, people at Malyan used not only cylinder seals but also stamp seals on their tablets.

Figure 8

Wall murals from area ABC Level III, Tal-e Malyan (Sumner Reference Sumner2003: fig. 18 and plate 11).

Courtesy of the Penn Museum.

3.7 Tepe Ozbaki

Along the northern edge of the Iranian plateau, one proto-Elamite tablet has been excavated at the multi-period site of Tepe Ozbaki. It was found in the area of a large mudbrick platform; bevel-rim bowls (Section 5.3.2) and the tablet were the only materials found to help date the platform (Majidzadeh Reference Majidzadeh2001; Vallat Reference Vallat2003).

3.8 Tepe Sofalin

In excavations between 2006 and 2018, approximately 136 tablets and fragments were found at Tepe Sofalin on the Rey plain in north-central Iran.Footnote ⁸ Around a dozen have been published (Dahl, Hessari & Yousefi Zoshk Reference Dahl, Hessari and Yousefi Zoshk2012; Hessari & Yousefi Zoshk Reference Hessari and Yousefi Zoshk2022, Reference Hessari and Yousefi Zoshk2023). This site is located near the later Great Khorasan Road, an advantageous position for long-distance trade in eastern resources, including lapis lazuli from Afghanistan. Little identifiable architecture has been uncovered at the site, which may have been occupied in the fourth millennium and then abandoned until the Iron Age.

Tablets were found in mixed secondary contexts along with seal impressions, tokens, figurines, bevel-rim bowls, and other Uruk-related and proto-Elamite ceramics (Hessari & Saeedi Reference Hessari and Saeedi2017; Matthews & Fazeli Nashli Reference Matthews and Fazeli Nashli2022: 222–223). Stylistically, the tablets range from Susa II/‘Late Uruk style’ to late proto-Elamite, showing that the north-central plateau was involved in the proto-Elamite phenomenon from its inception through late in its history. The published tablets are fragmentary, but their style largely conforms to those at Susa. Two or more fragments use a sign unknown elsewhere, an inversion of the common Susa sign M376.

3.9 The Proto-Elamite Phenomenon

Although the sample size of tablets from Tal-e Malyan, Tepe Yahya, and the other sites is too low to offer robust comparisons, a few general conclusions can be drawn. There was a high level of conformity in writing at Susa and other sites in terms of the basic sign inventory, syntax, and tablet formats, but some distinct features and signs appear. No tablets from other sites yet show as much structural complexity as the Susa texts, and their numerical notations suggest much more modest economic planning than at Susa, where tablets sometimes count large tracts of land and large numbers of animals and humans.

What were the cultural links between the different sites at which proto-Elamite tablets have been found? In what ways were contacts maintained and identities shared along the dimensions of kinship, language, raw or finished product exchange, political alliance, or religious practice? Who were the proto-Elamite scribes, and what was their relationship with the many people that we believe they were counting, organising, and feeding? These questions are part of the broader decipherment puzzle.

4.1 What Is ‘Decipherment’?

A popular conception of ‘decipherment’, as illustrated by the phrase ‘crack the code’, implies a decisive moment at which a systemic whole is opened up for understanding. This notion simplifies the process of script ‘decipherment’ and usually reduces it to the identification of the language(s) encoded. The decipherment of Linear B, an ancient Aegean script whose language was identified in the 1950s as early Greek, illustrates this idea, even if scholars continue to work on understanding many aspects of those texts. Linear B was a mixed logo-syllabic system relying primarily on syllabic writings, so that a correct mapping of syllables to signs produced sufficient evidence to identify the language. It is well established that proto-Elamite is a notation system of a different nature and therefore presents its own form of decipherment problem and will require different methods to understand.

In writing systems, a sign can represent an idea or word (‘ideogram’ or ‘logogram’), a syllable (‘ka’), a phoneme (‘k’), or a grammatical morpheme of language such as the plural marker ‘s’ in English, which can sound different in different situations, for example cats (/s/) and dogs, (/z/). Using symbols to communicate through the filter of language is called ‘glottography’. Semasiography, on the other hand, is communication that sidesteps direct connection with language (☺). All writing systems mix different communication strategies, including the alphabetic one used to write this Element (consider $, &, !), but the balance of strategies differs, particularly between alphabetic scripts and ‘logo-syllabic’ scripts such as Chinese.

‘Pure’ ideographies – that is, ideographic systems that can express a range of information rivalling the flexibility of heavily language-dependent writing systems – do not exist, although many complex and systematised but highly context-specific symbol systems do exist, such as musical notation or European heraldry (Morin Reference 108Morin2023; Sproat Reference Sproat2023). Proto-Elamite may in fact be such a highly context-dependent and fully ideographic system, but it is also possible that some probably limited uses of signs for sounds were introduced. What is certain is that numerical notations are an essential frame for all of the information included in proto-Elamite writing and that the system of signs providing complex annotation to the numerals is at least substantially, if not wholly, ideographic. What does the decipherment of such a notation system entail?

Decipherment problems are shaped by a large number of factors. J. L. Dahl (Reference Dahl2019: 68) describes the proto-Elamite situation as ‘decipherment of a somewhat known writing system, coding somewhat known information, perhaps related to an unknown language’. In favour of proto-Elamite’s decipherment prospects is the relatively large size of the corpus and the high possibility that new texts will be found. The writing system also shows a promising level of standardisation, even at different sites. But perhaps most promising of all is our relatively secure understanding of the numerical systems on which all proto-Elamite information is centred and the ‘starter’ clues for the things that those numerical systems count as provided by the related proto-cuneiform systems.

We have very little evidence on which to make suggestions about the languages spoken in prehistoric Iran. Susa’s history is marked by connections to groups from the west, and Akkadian is attested in several periods. After the disappearance of proto-Elamite, Iran produced no textual evidence at all for several centuries, until Sumerian and Akkadian were documented in cuneiform. The earliest traces of Elamite are personal names that appear in cuneiform texts during the third millennium, and the first document in Elamite is a treaty of the Akkadian king Naram-Sin found at Susa (twenty-third century BCE). Fewer than ten cuneiform Elamite tablets are known before 1500 BCE, including royal inscriptions and a possible incantation (Tavernier Reference Tavernier, Álvarez-Mon, Basello and Wicks2018: 418),Footnote ⁹ leaving us especially poorly informed about its early grammar and vocabulary. Elamite cannot be linked to a known language family.Footnote ¹⁰ The Zagros mountains, through which Susa and other proto-Elamite sites were connected, historically hosted other isolated or marginally known languages, including Gutian, Lullubite, Kassite, and Hurrian (Zadok Reference Zadok and Potts2013).

In this Element, ‘decipherment’ is considered not in the narrow sense of language context identification but instead in the sense of understanding the system and the information it conveys. Most people would, after all, think it reasonable to say you could ‘decipher’ a system of musical notation! While it is possible that proto-Elamite might still divulge some linguistic data, which would indeed be an exciting prospect, there is good evidence that sound-signs play at best a limited role. The non-linguistic information about ancient Iranian society that we can recover from careful study of this system is likely to continue to prove far richer, informing us about social identities, social organisation, food and drink, animal management, craft activities, developments in mathematical practice, long-distance connections, and more.

4.2 Neither Pictographs Nor Quite Hieroglyphs

Signs in proto-Elamite look significantly less like ‘pictures of things’ than in all other known pristine inventions of writing. This led Scheil (Reference Scheil1900) to assume that the script was a later stage of a hieroglyphic forerunner, but we now know it to follow on shortly from the pre-literate systems of accounting (Section 2). Some part of the aesthetic context for the often ‘geometric’ or ‘schematic’ character of many proto-Elamite signs may be found in a genre of seal imagery (‘glazed steatite’/‘piedmont’) that developed around the same time as the script and can be shown to share some shapes with it (Pittman Reference 109Pittman1994). Another dimension of proto-Elamite’s schematic approach to sign shapes may lie in the desire for scribes to deliberately distance themselves from their proto-cuneiform neighbours, whose script is more clearly built on depictions of things (Dahl Reference Dahl2025).

A different style of proto-Elamite seal imagery, the ‘classic style’, features animals in natural or human-like poses, mountains, vegetation, and various objects. Some proto-Elamite signs may also have been modelled in relation to this imagery, including mountains, plants, and reed poles. The relationship between sign and seal shapes suggests an origin for writing that is very different from literal ‘pictography’ (drawing a tree to indicate a tree). Instead, it is possible that the symbolic system for representing people or social institutions, already in metaphorical or conventional ways in seals, was adapted to record some social identities in script (Kelley Reference Kelley, Cartolano and Ferrara2024).

In general, when signs can be identified as depictions of things in proto-Elamite, it has limited application for decipherment in the absence of other forms of evidence. A few proto-Elamite signs, especially pots and containers, are helpfully recognisable and sometimes lead us to their (approximate) meaning. At least one vessel sign, however, may have been co-opted to write a syllable to spell someone’s name (Dahl Reference Dahl2019: fig. 13). ‘Plough’ and ‘yoke’ signs rely on metonymy – a thing used to express a related thing or idea – to refer to ‘fields to be ploughed (of a standard size?)’ and ‘workers’ respectively. Some animal head (equid?) signs may record human identities rather than animals.

In contrast to most primary inventions of writing, including cuneiform, Egyptian, Chinese, and Mayan which generously depict humans and human body parts to indicate actions (among other things), proto-Elamite script avoids almost all iconic depictions of humans and their body parts. The proto-Elamite ‘female’ sign (M72), a depiction of a woman’s pubic triangle, may have been loaned from proto-cuneiform into the icon-light proto-Elamite environment where its ‘iconicity’ was essentially submerged (Dahl Reference Dahl, Hawkins, Kelley and Garcia-Ventura2018: 246). Perhaps the writing system found little need for ‘body part for action’ icons common in other scripts since ledgers may not require verbal terminologies (Nissen Reference Nissen2016).

Yet humans are also not found in the seal imagery, which instead shows animals striking human poses (Dahl Reference Dahl2014). The avoidance of humans in both seal images and writing may thus have a religious dimension that we know little about (Dahl Reference Dahl2023). C. Paladre (Reference Paladre, Scott and Topçuoğli2025) suggests a rare depiction of a human form in a seal impression on a proto-Elamite tablet may in fact be a deity, raising the possibility that the human form was restricted to divine representation.

4.3 Early Proto-Elamite Studies

Like the study of the later Elamite language and cultural identity, it is probably the case that the proto-Elamite texts have suffered from marginalisation in academic research partly because they do not fit within the disciplinary boundaries formed primarily in nineteenth-century Europe, which were shaped by language-group affiliations. Elamite, one of the long-presumed candidates for the language of proto-Elamite scribes, is an isolate, and its very existence was questioned into the early twentieth century (Basello Reference Basello, Panaino and Piras2004).

The first epigraphist tasked with publishing the tablets from Susa was Scheil, who was a talented Assyriologist. Despite dedicating much of his time to publishing cuneiform sources, including an edition of the famous law stele of Hammurabi uncovered at Susa, Scheil was swift in cataloguing, drawing, and commenting on the Susian proto-Elamite tablets in the Mémoires of the French archaeological mission in Iran (MDP 6 in 1905; MDP 17 in 1923; and MDP 26 in 1935). This did not, however, result in establishing proto-Elamite as a thriving field of research. An early remark by Scheil (Reference Scheil1905: 59) on the origins of proto-Elamite and its relationship to cuneiform may remind us how formidable was the task of making sense of these new objects within a burgeoning scholarly field that was grappling with new archaeological discoveries, uncertain chronologies, and a massive body of untranslated cuneiform texts: ‘In a matter so new and singularly delicate, one has to be measured in what one says.’

In his first attempt at understanding the tablets, Scheil produced fanciful interpretations of proto-Elamite with cuneiform sign names (Scheil Reference Scheil1905: 123), suspecting that proto-Elamite shared deep roots with cuneiform even while correctly identifying proto-Elamite as an independent writing system. In his next volume, two decades later (Scheil Reference Scheil1923), he described the tablets as containing a rich variety of products and personal designations. A prominent strategy was to identify ‘products’ by the shape of signs, often filtered through cuneiform parallels, such as interpreting M32 as ‘wood’, comparing it with cuneiform GIŠ:

Such examples are rather unconvincing in the absence of other evidence. Scheil produced his last publication of around 650 proto-Elamite tablets in 1935 (MDP 26 and a supplement volume) with drawings and only brief commentary. He did, however, make an observation that was later to become important: the tablets showed evidence of standard numerical relationships between different types of things. Roland de Mecquenem, a mining engineer and excavator at Susa, published fifty tablets from Susa in 1949, with some commentary on those and previous texts, and another fifteen in 1956, but attempts to study the contents of the inscriptions were only taken up in earnest decades later.

An insightful paper by William Brice (Reference Brice1962), a scholar of early Aegean scripts, foreshadowed some new approaches to proto-Elamite. Brice noted the significant differences between proto-Elamite and the much later and smaller Linear Elamite corpus appearing on stone sculptures and vessels, which was then still called proto-Elamite and taken to be a later development of the script. Brice’s position on the discontinuity between these corpora is accepted by most modern scholars (Englund Reference Englund and Houston2004; Potts Reference Potts2016: 118; Matthews & Fazeli Nashli Reference Matthews and Fazeli Nashli2022: 360; Dahl Reference Dahl2023; cf. Desset et al. Reference Desset, Tabibzadeh, Kervran, Basello and Marchesi2022) (Section 8.2). Brice’s study suggested that proto-Elamite may have been fully ideographic and that ‘any attempt to comprehend it by a general application of sound values to the signs would be invalid from the outset’ (Brice Reference Brice1962: 16). He also remarked on the significant problem of finding proofs for proposed interpretations of proto-Elamite signs that had plagued scholarship up to that point.

4.4 The Phonetic Writing Hypothesis

A very different tack was developed next in a three-volume study La scrittura proto-elamica by Piero Meriggi (Reference Meriggi1971–1974). Meriggi (1899–1982) was a professor of linguistics, rather than a cuneiform scholar, and this shaped his approach to proto-Elamite. After an unsuccessful attempt to link the Elamite language to non-Indo-European Anatolian languages (Meriggi Reference Meriggi1966), he shifted his attention to proto-Elamite script. The greatest contribution of his volume to subsequent scholarship has been the sign list, which forms the basis for the current work-in-progress list.

Meriggi (Reference Meriggi1971: 5) expressed his conviction that the existence of purely ideographic writing (i.e. with no sound-signs) was an unproven postulate, a prejudice (pregiudizio) that had impeded progress in decipherment, drawing a parallel with the notion that Egyptian hieroglyphic writing might be such a system before its decipherment proved this to be incorrect.Footnote ¹¹ His singular focus is made clear in the way he opened the concluding discussion to his study:

In his opinion, large numbers of proto-Elamite signs were used alternately for ideographic and sound values (Meriggi Reference Meriggi1971: 27), and phonetic encoding of names was the only reasonable explanation for long sequences of signs (Reference Meriggi1971: §51).Footnote ¹² Meriggi’s conviction has remained influential up to the present (Vallat Reference Vallat1986; Englund Reference Englund and Houston2004; Desset Reference Desset2012; Dahl Reference Dahl2019) (Section 5.6).

Scheil (Reference Scheil1923: i–ii) had already briefly speculated that the script had developed, in its later stages, some signs to write phonetic values (echoed by Vallat Reference Vallat1986: 339), contradicting his earlier position (Scheil Reference Scheil1905) that proto-Elamite was solely ideographic. Tentative corroboration for chronological developments in the script that might imply the introduction of syllabic writing is found from the small-scale controlled excavations at Susa: tablets of later phases have longer sequences of signs than earlier tablets (Dahl, Petrie & Potts Reference Dahl, Petrie, Potts and Petrie2013). As recently as 2005, Dahl (Reference Dahl2005b: 120) commented that full availability of the corpus and updated copies and transliterations of tablets are still needed in order to assess ‘whether or not ad hoc phoneticism … existed in proto-Elamite, or whether it may even have undergone some level of standardization’.

Little progress has yet been made on distilling possible phonetic spellings, and no single sign or word reading has been put forth. Although some commentators may only consider proto-Elamite deciphered if we are able to ‘read’ names or words written with some phonetic coding, in fact this remains a relatively minor part of the decipherment project, since the possible syllabic writings are limited in comparison to ideographic writings and would not lead to understanding most of the information conveyed in proto-Elamite texts. Nonetheless, if we could prove the existence of specific syllabic readings in proto-Elamite, it would be exciting.

4.5 Developing a Robust and Multi-stranded Methodology

Meriggi’s works were published just prior to a transformation in understanding proto-Elamite that began in the late 1970s. This was brought about by the work of a group of scholars – especially Assyriologist Robert K. Englund, mathematician Jöran Friberg, and Peter Damerow, an anthropologist specialising in numeracy – who combined new attention to numerical notations with rigorous comparison to proto-cuneiform sources that were themselves undergoing intensive new study and publication. The work of all three scholars emphasised the interconnectedness between proto-cuneiform and proto-Elamite. Damerow (Reference Damerow2006) eventually articulated the case for a weak connection between script and language in its earliest stages of invention, taking proto-cuneiform and proto-Elamite as his examples. By this, Damerow meant that symbols conveyed information without relying on specific words in a language (on semasiography, see Section 4.1).

Early twentieth-century comparisons between proto-Elamite and cuneiform were unsound because they were based on much later cuneiform sign shapes, relied on similarities between singular signs, and paid little attention to how signs were really used.Footnote ¹³ But when sets of parallel signs in proto-cuneiform and proto-Elamite can be identified, and when there are other kinds of corroborating evidence, stronger cases for sign sharing can be made. Meriggi (Reference Meriggi1969) recognised this but only had limited success in implementing a comparative methodology.

The situation began to change with the commentary on the publication of texts from Tepe Yahya by Damerow and Englund (Reference Damerow and Englund1989). This publication showcased how numerical information and careful comparative work could bring new depth of understanding to proto-Elamite. They proposed that the proto-cuneiform and proto-Elamite signs for ‘female’, ‘male’ (of a particular social category), ‘young one’, and ‘yoked ones’ were related sets of signs for dependent workers (Figure 9). For example, the proto-Elamite sign M54 not only looks like proto-cuneiform ERIM, the forerunner to a later Sumerian worker designation, but is also used in ways suggesting it denotes workers.Footnote ¹⁴ Meriggi had failed to understand the relationships between worker signs in the two scripts and had, rather confusingly for modern readers, transliterated the ‘man’ sign M388 as the cuneiform sign for ‘young one’ (TUR).

Figure 9

Approximate decipherment of signs for workers, including ‘female’ M72, ‘male/person’ M388, and ‘yoked one’ M54 in proto-Elamite, through comparison with proto-cuneiform. Proto-Elamite tablet MDP 26, 205/P008893. Proto-cuneiform tablet MSVO 1, 212/P005279.

Image courtesy of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative/© Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

The most profound advance in proto-Elamite studies has been the improved understanding of the closely related proto-cuneiform and proto-Elamite numerical systems. Comparison with cuneiform bookkeeping led to the recognition of worker-to-grain ratios in proto-Elamite, which signal the writing system’s role in redistributive behaviours that similarly dominate the cuneiform textual sources of the third millennium (Section 5.3.2). This social and economic parallel may not be so surprising if we consider Susa’s well-documented cultural ties to the west over several millennia. In fact, when Assyriologist I. J. Gelb described the pan-Mesopotamian ‘rationing’ systems of temple and palace institutions that persisted, with local variations, throughout early Mesopotamian history, one of the important groups of sources he drew on was the corpus of Old Akkadian cuneiform tablets from Susa (c. 2350–2100 BCE) (Gelb Reference Gelb1965). Proto-Elamite is especially fascinating for the way in which numerical and social phenomena are interwoven.

The identification of a handful of basic worker signs through proto-cuneiform parallels established proto-Elamite’s interest in personnel management, but it also planted the seeds for new and wide-reaching interpretive possibilities. In particular, many other proto-Elamite signs that were counted in parallel with these signs or allotted the same standard amounts of grain could therefore also be identified as likely personnel designations (Englund and Damerow Reference Damerow and Englund1989; Englund Reference Englund and Houston2004; Hawkins Reference Hawkins2015; Dahl, Hawkins & Kelley Reference Dahl, Hawkins, Kelley and Garcia-Ventura2018).

In fact, a careful reading of the Texts from Tepe Yahya (1989) and another foundational comparative study, Archaic Bookkeeping (Nissen, Damerow & Englund Reference Nissen, Damerow and Englund1993), reveals that in some cases the proto-Elamite evidence provided crucial links between the opaque proto-cuneiform accounts and labour administration practices and terminologies found in later cuneiform. For example, proto-Elamite M54 ‘workers’ and M3 ‘overseers’ can be shown by structural and other clues, such as their association with standardised amounts of grain, to designate workers and team leaders. This links them to the later Sumerian (viz. cuneiform) erim ‘workers’ and ugula ‘overseers’, although the meanings of the similarly shaped proto-cuneiform signs are less clear from their contexts. In addition, proto-Elamite contains lengthy ‘worker ration’ texts recalling later cuneiform genres, while no close parallels have been found in proto-cuneiform (Kelley Reference Dahl, Hawkins, Kelley and Garcia-Ventura2018).

Internal proto-Elamite structural clues were also given new attention by this group of scholars. Englund (Englund Reference Englund and Houston2004: 105) put forward a hypothesis that has significantly shaped the past decades of work on proto-Elamite, namely that some ways in which information is arranged in tablets mimic ‘the organizational structure of a labour unit’. Englund was especially referring to the grouping of workers under ‘overseers’ in personnel counts and ration lists, phenomena well-attested in later third millennium cuneiform.

Proto-Elamite might now be said to be remarkably well understood for an ‘undeciphered’ script. Knowledge about the mechanics of the system and the contents of tablets has been pieced together in different ways, in particular by combining knowledge of related Mesopotamian proto-cuneiform and later cuneiform numerical systems, signs, and bookkeeping practices with the study of the internal structures of proto-Elamite such as numerical notations and sequences of signs. This method has produced a corpus that at points seems to straddle the line between ‘undeciphered’ and ‘deciphered’. The strongest arguments for understanding the meaning or functional category of a sign come when different types of evidence converge (Figure 10).

Figure 10

The approximate decipherment of ideographic signs in proto-Elamite through converging forms of evidence.

The transformation of proto-Elamite studies brought about after the 1970s can be illustrated by two tablets which Scheil had interpreted as lists of diverse goods (Figure 11). Scheil’s pictographically interpreted ‘basket’ (M59) and ‘arrow’ (M124) are now securely identified as personnel designations (e.g. Section 7.2), and the ‘tree’ sign is also suspected to be a person by structural parallel. This tablet counts personnel alongside grain in a derived capacity system identifiable by striations across the signs, similarly to how derived systems are formed in proto-cuneiform. Scheil, unfamiliar with proto-cuneiform counting, had interpreted it as a ‘crossed out’ and incorrectly calculated total of objects.

Figure 11

Left: MDP 17,174/P008372, interpreted by Scheil (Reference Scheil1923) as: ‘delivery of wood, trees, and a basket’. Right: MDP 17, 419/P008617, interpreted by Scheil (Reference Scheil1923) as: ‘inventory of “arrows” calculated by measurement, tablets (?), wineskins, metal rods, vase with three spouts, pot (?), piece of carpentry, cut stone (?), axe, pendant’. These tablets are now thought to record quantities of grain for administrative personnel.

© GrandPalaisRmn (musée du Louvre)/Stéphane Maréchalle.

Thus, by the time that Englund published his ‘State of Decipherment of Proto-Elamite’ (Reference Englund and Houston2004), a powerful methodology had been established, combining comparisons with cuneiform bookkeeping, analysis of numerical information, and internal proto-Elamite structural evidence, which had gone some way to address the problems identified by Brice. Yet many of Englund’s observations require a great deal more unpacking, and the interpretation of signs as ‘dependent workers’, ‘officials’, ‘households’, and so forth needs elaboration, a challenge only just beginning to be picked up (e.g. Yousefi Zoshk, Baghizadeh & Etemadifar Reference Yousefi Zoshk, Baghizadeh, Etemadifar, Koch and Kirleis2019). A current task in decipherment is to pursue a better understanding of what is now a significantly expanded set of suspected person-category signs and sign combinations.

Although this sketch of proto-Elamite scholarship has focused on changing views about where and how people are recorded in the proto-Elamite texts, the presence of animals and products is also an important part of the decipherment puzzle. Adopting the multi-stranded and comparative methodology just described, Dahl (Reference Dahl2005b) was able to approximately decipher sheep and goat herding terminologies in proto-Elamite. However, few studies have tackled other product designations in recent decades, and text genres such as the ‘bread and beer’ tablets tentatively identified by Friberg (Reference Friberg1978) and the related undeciphered products in Figure 20 await further study.

4.6 The Building Blocks of Decipherment

While one may imagine that long-standing decipherment problems require ingenious new approaches, the most significant stumbling block to progress is very often poor documentation of inscriptions (Dahl Reference Dahl2019: 68–69). In this respect, the work of Englund and Dahl from the 1990s onwards has transformed proto-Elamite studies by building a full online corpus hosted by the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI). The transliterations provided in this database represent almost solely the work of Dahl, who also created the work-in-progress sign list that is used in modern scholarship.Footnote ¹⁵ An influx over the past years of better tablet images, especially after a collaboration was established between the National Museum of Iran and the CDLI in 2018, has provided researchers with the first reliable images of many tablets, paving the way for new studies.

The digital corpus established by the CDLI and the Dahl transliteration system have also enabled a series of computational and machine-learning studies that have begun exploring new approaches to decipherment (Monroe et al. Reference Monroe, Kelley, Born and Sarkar2025). With approximately 1,700 proto-Elamite tablets, the benefits of computational and machine-learning work are obvious, though approaches must be selected carefully to match the data. Machine learning and the tools of natural language processing have been adapted in recent years to study and automatically translate ancient text corpora. These tools address research questions for scripts that we can already understand. Adapting techniques to study undeciphered writing systems is a small but burgeoning field that is exploring and assessing new methodologies (Ferrara and Tamburini Reference Ferrara and Tamburini2022).

Some relatively simple methods from computer science have shown potential: L. Born et al. (Reference Born, Kelley, Kambhatla, Chen and Sarkar2019) investigated corpus subdivisions with ‘topic modelling’, showing, among other things, clear distinctions between two broad groupings of animal husbandry-related tablets. The authors compare methods for clustering signs based on the contexts in which they are used and provide tools for extracting repeated sign sequences (‘n-grams’) as well as other features of interest for exploring the corpus.Footnote ¹⁶

More advanced computational methods have also begun to address questions about the writing system. When Hidden Markov models were used to assign ‘states’ to sign sequences, one state regularly corresponded to ‘headers’ as labelled on the CDLI (Born et al. Reference Born, Monroe, Kelley and Sarkar2022). The results not only confirm the unique role that headers play but have also given us evidence for revising our understanding of where the ‘headers’ in tablets end and where the next entry begins, a long-standing decipherment problem (Brice Reference Brice1962). Born et al. (Reference Born, Monroe, Kelley and Sarkar2021) used embedding models to study semantic compositionality, finding that many complex graphemes (Section 5.2) can be shown to represent a semantic combination of their two parts, and that ‘analogies’ exist between parts of different complex graphemes (the role of A in A+B is semantically analogous to that in A+C). This is interesting for decipherment prospects because it suggests that rather than being idiosyncratic or emblematic combinations, some complex graphemes may be understood through studying how their sign components are used separately and together (cf. Figure 21B).

The same authors developed an algorithm for machine learning to explore patterns in the corpus based on a combination of the uses of those signs and their shapes (a ‘multi-modal’ approach using computer vision), on the hypothesis that many similar-looking signs may have similar or identical meanings (while others probably do not) (Kelley et al. Reference Kelley, Born, Monroe and Sarkar2022). This method may help correct for the biases that the imperfect transliteration system introduces to computational studies. An algorithm working with both contextual and sign-shape information better approximates how a human mind might approach the hunt for pattern recognition in the corpus but with instant access to the whole dataset.

It is clear that data exploration and visualisation tools, as well as more advanced computational methods, have much to contribute to proto-Elamite studies in the coming years. When considering the potential of such tools in combination with the methodological approaches described earlier, it is hard not to feel that a wide range of new discoveries are just around the corner. We can also look forward to the chance to assess the recent claim that Linear Elamite sign reading can help decipher proto-Elamite personal names (Desset et al. Reference Desset, Tabibzadeh, Kervran, Basello and Marchesi2022: 53).

5.1 Types of Marks

Proto-Elamite tablets bear different types of clay markings: seals, assorted archival (or para-textual) marks, numerical notations, and non-numerical signs. Archival markings include line rulings, slashes across the corners of some tablets, and scribal designs. Both line rulings and corner marks are phenomena with very close parallels in proto-cuneiform and are one of many minor details of scribal practice that hint at interactions between proto-Elamite and proto-cuneiform scribes (Englund Reference Englund and Houston2004; Dahl Reference Dahl2019: 65–66).

Several stylistic groups of proto-Elamite seals are known (Pittman Reference Pittman and Gyselen1997). Seals are a central aspect of the administrative culture, found on an estimated quarter of proto-Elamite tablets. They are often rolled across the back side of the tablet and sometimes also the front. We can look forward to an updated assessment of seal impressions across the corpus in the coming years, as better images of the sometimes-faint impressions on tablets in museum collections become available (Figure 12).

Figure 12

Proto-Elamite tablet with a faint seal impression on both sides, showing an equid, mountain, and plant motif. MDP 6, 358/P008140 (Sb 15184).

Author’s photographs, courtesy of the Louvre. View a 3D model in the additional resources available at 10.1017/9781009614559.

Seals do not contain lines of proto-Elamite writing, but a few single proto-Elamite ‘institution’ signs appear in some seals (Figure 13). However, similarities between seal imagery and signs are abundant, and it is possible that some proto-Elamite signs are modelled on seal motifs (Pittman Reference 109Pittman1994; Kelley Reference Kelley, Cartolano and Ferrara2024). How seals may be tied to individual identities, families, or productive units and whether units were organised under a ruling household remain poorly understood. Scribal designs (Section 7, Figure 25) are largely symmetrical geometric shapes which might function similarly to seals as marks of social authorisation (Dahl Reference Dahl, Hessari and Yousefi Zoshk2012a).

Figure 13

Left: Drawings of seal impressions on tablets from Susa, in which the seal designs incorporate ‘institution’ signs found in the script. A: MDP 43, 933. B: MDP 16, 266. C: MDP 43, 1011. D: MDP 16, 314.

Courtesy of Éditions Geuthner. Right: Proto-Elamite signs and their transliterations.

5.2 Proto-Elamite Signs

Proto-Elamite tablets invariably count things. They do so using a dual notation system made up of non-numerical signs and numerical signs, which are visibly distinct: the numerical signs are written using a few differently sized round stylus edges impressed at different angles (Figure 14, styli 1 and 2). The non-numerical signs are mostly written with a thinner stylus tip (stylus 3), but many include components made with the numerical styli, such as M288 _ga . Dahl has argued that, for non-numerical signs, later proto-Elamite scribes left strokes with more pronounced ‘wedge heads’ than earlier ones, a development paralleled in proto-cuneiform.

Figure 14

The shapes and sizes of proto-Elamite styli. A: Dahl (Reference Dahl2019: fig. 4). B: Seal impression on a tablet, seal art after Amiet (Reference Amiet1980) no. 1037. C: The numerical styli became somewhat smaller after Susa II (pre-proto-Elamite).

Drawing up an accurate sign list and creating transliteration conventions are crucial, but far from simple, aspects of decipherment research. The sign naming system in this Element follows Dahl’s work-in-progress list (Dahl Reference Dahl2023, fn. 9 and 10),Footnote ¹⁷ including around 40 numerical notations (N1, N2 etc.) and 1,620 non-numerical signs (M1 to the M500s, M alluding to Meriggi’s list).Footnote ¹⁸ The M-numbers include many signs that are suspected to be variants as well as combinations of signs called complex graphemes (Dahl Reference Dahl2005a). Complex graphemes can include one sign inscribed inside another (M157+M136), a sign flanked by two of the same or mirrored signs (M387_ca+M340+M387_ca), or occasionally signs adjacent to each other (M59+M38_a) (Table 2).

An alphabetic subscript can be added to the M-number when it is not clear if two similar shapes are allographs (different shapes, identical meanings). Rarely, a second alphabetic subscript marks minor variations (M387_c and M387_ca), and if allographs are strongly suspected, a numamite inscriptions on metaelrical subscript is added (M269_a1 and M269_a2). Proto-Elamite scribes also modified signs with extra lines in a manner similar to proto-cuneiform (Dahl Reference Dahl2019: fig. 8). Most of these are labelled as alphabetic variants, but the cuneiform term gunû (Sumerian, ‘speckled’) has also been introduced (M288_gunû). Sometimes there is evidence that minor variations are meaningful, such as M387_a and M387_ef which are used in alternation in the same text (Section 7.3). But other times it is more difficult to establish whether slightly different shapes have different meanings, such as M157, M157_a, and M175 (Table 2).

Table 2Sign formation and transliteration conventions for proto-Elamite

Table 2 long description.

Table 2 Long description

Proto-Elamite signs are shown with their ‘transliteration’, such as N1, and an image of their shape. Some signs are composed of circular stylus impressions, and others of straight stylus strokes. Some signs are compounds, that is combinations of more than one sign. Several of the example signs look similar to one another, but show minor graphical differences.

The number of signs and the frequency of their use are important evidence within the decipherment puzzle, but the issue of graphical variation makes analysis difficult. For example, if we merge all variants (surely too drasticFootnote ¹⁹) and consider complex graphemes in their constituent parts, we find around 360 ‘basic’ signs. Even though we must grapple with a possible range of signs between 360 and 1,620, we can still make some important observations. For one, we can see that a handful of hyper-common signs (over 500 usesFootnote ²⁰) give way to very common and common signs, with incremental decline all the way to a group of around 700 signs found only once.Footnote ²¹

Many of these hapax legomena and rare signs are certainly allographs of more common signs, but others may represent ‘ad hoc’ sign creation (Dahl Reference Dahl2005a) that has been attributed to a flexibility in scribal culture, such as a ‘bird’ icon found only at Tal-e Malyan, perhaps representing a particular owner (Table 2, bottom right). Dahl (Reference Dahl2019: 82) drew a parallel to Mongolian horse-branding symbols to suggest that some signs designating owners in proto-Elamite may be created by a scribal practice open to ‘almost unlimited possibilities of variation’. Well-standardised sets of basic shapes with high levels of small variation are also a feature of seal imagery, and this might suggest some level of influence on the development of writing from social representation strategies employed by seal-carvers (Kelley Reference Kelley, Cartolano and Ferrara2024).

Dahl (Reference Dahl2005a: 106) gave a preliminary estimation of the number of scribal hands represented in the texts uncovered from Susa as ‘in the tens’, while M. Stolper (Reference Stolper1985: 5) identified a few different hands among the thirty-two tablets from Tal-e Malyan. The lack of stratigraphically controlled excavations at Susa limits our understanding of archival and chronological groups, but further triangulation of tablet features and palaeography in the future may allow us to more confidently disentangle scribal hands and better understand changes over time.

The current set of sign numbers and alphabetic subscripts is therefore understood to include a mix of what are probably distinct signs on the one hand and what may be allographs in different hands and different script phases on the other. Clarifying these dimensions is central to understanding the writing system. A sign list revised in this way would also be a great help to decipherment efforts based on the analysis of repeated sign sequences.

5.3 Counting in Proto-Elamite

Proto-Elamite used eight different numerical systems, each to count different kinds of things or to count things in different contexts. Five of these are ‘primary’ systems and three are graphically modified forms of those primary systems. With the important exception of a unique proto-Elamite decimal system (see later), the systems map closely in form onto the more common of proto-cuneiform’s thirteen main and derived systems, and where evidence is available, they also seem to be used to count similar ranges of things. The numerical systems are thus the feature most closely shared with proto-cuneiform, and they have offered the strongest line of attack into decipherment.

The way we think about numbers, like other aspects of human cognition, is shaped by things we do and objects we use (Overmann Reference Overmann2021). Proto-Elamite numerical systems, like their precursor clay token systems, used sets of differently shaped signs to represent ‘units’ in a series (ten ‘small circles’ equal one ‘large circle’). Numerical relationships between shapes in each system can be represented in factor diagrams (e.g. bottom of Figure 15). This method of numerical notation, and the use of special numerical styli, endured in cuneiform until its full replacement with place-based notation nearly a thousand years later.

Many of the approximately forty different numerical sign shapes were shared between systems (often with different values), sometimes making it difficult or impossible to determine which system was used in a given tablet. Some signs are consistently counted in a given system, such as M346 ‘sheep’ (decimal system), but others can be counted in more than one system, such as the ‘female’ sign M72 that appears alternately in decimal and sexagesimal counts (Section 5.3.1). A current ‘best guess’ at corpus-wide numerical use with the help of machine learning (Born et al. Reference Born2023) highlights the overwhelming importance of the capacity system which is believed to count measures of grain (Table 3).

Table 3Estimated distribution of the major numerical systems. Data compiled by L. Born. Descriptions of the application of the systems after Englund (2004: fig. 5.4)

Table 3 long description.

Table 3 Long description

The table shows the different types of numerical systems along with how commonly they are used (both with certainty and possible further uses). The Capacity measures far outnumber the other systems, with at least 590 and perhaps over 1000 uses. Bisexagesimal systems are provable in 9 tablets, but possible in 218; Decimal in 52 and 318 respectively, and sexagesimal in 59 and 412. The Area system is attested in a single text.

5.3.1 Counting Animals and People

A significant discovery has been that proto-Elamite, unlike proto-cuneiform, counted people in two distinct systems: a sexagesimal one common to proto-cuneiform and a unique proto-Elamite decimal system (Meriggi Reference Meriggi1969; Friberg Reference Friberg1978).Footnote ²² Proto-Elamite sheep and goats are counted in the decimal system, as well as possibly gazelles or other wild caprids and, in at least one unusual text, equids. But Englund (Reference Englund and Houston2004) noted that the male, female, ‘young’, and ‘yoked’ signs that are also found in proto-cuneiform (counted sexagesimally) can be counted with the decimal system in proto-Elamite. He proposed that the native proto-Elamite decimal system was used for ‘lower status’ human workers, while the sexagesimal system was used to count administrative elites who emulated Uruk-related cultural practices (see further Section 6.5).Footnote ²³

Brice (Reference Brice1962) had earlier suggested that the ‘male’ sign M388 could represent an animal such as an equid, and indeed the similar proto-cuneiform sign can sometimes be used for both equids and bovines. It is at least plausible that M388, the yoke M54, and the female M72 could sometimes represent animals, but cumulative evidence suggests that these signs mainly represent humans. For example, the wide variety of signs counted in parallel with these signs are more likely worker categories than highly diverse animal terminologies; additionally, many M388 seem to be ‘named’ or otherwise complexly designated and grouped under ‘overseers’ who are also themselves designated as M388. Sometimes these personnel are arranged in standard-sized groups of 10 and 100 (Section 6.5).

By contrast, the sexagesimal system counts signs that are thought to represent a different sphere of administrative personnel or productive units (Section 6.5). But as in proto-cuneiform, the proto-Elamite sexagesimal system is also widely used to count things. Archaeologist Mario Liverani (Reference Liverani1998: 57) describes the significance of the proto-cuneiform creation of a ‘sexagesimal world’, the numerical structure of which facilitated the computation of links between goods, people, measures of land, and time reckoned by 30-day months and 360-day years. In proto-Elamite, sexagesimal counts can be identified for products in jars as well as undeciphered signs. A simple record counts 2,670 jars of what is probably ghee or a similar dairy product M269_b (Dahl Reference Dahl2005b).

The sexagesimal system can also count ‘halves’ of one, especially in connection with certain signs such as M376 and M320 (both undeciphered). Scheil, who interpreted M320 as an ideogram for a man, already struck on an explanation for the seemingly disquieting count of ‘half a man’: the scribes were not exactly counting men but rather labour capacity and/or feeding needs, such that a half day of work, or a small child with less productive capacity, might be counted as ‘half a man’. Although the meaning of M320 remains unknown, the idea that people or animals were counted in this way finds corroboration in proto-cuneiform and later cuneiform scribal practices, where calculations of ‘man hours’ flourished in administrative texts through the end of the third millennium BCE (Englund Reference 103Englund1988).

Figure 15

A sexagesimal count of ‘10½’ personnel(?) (MDP 6, 219/P008018).

Images: © GrandPalaisRmn (musée du Louvre)/Stéphane Maréchalle.

5.3.2 Proto-writing and the Evolution of Simplicity

If the count of 10½ M320 in Figure 15 indirectly indicates labour capability or feeding requirements, this means that, like in neighbouring Mesopotamia, there was a conception of how much work of a particular type a man could do or how much he should be fed within a given time. In proto-Elamite, time periods may be implied by accounting practices and possibly by some simple numerical notations found on the edges of many tablets which have yet to be compiled and studied. However, no discrete timekeeping system is found in the regular proto-Elamite numerical notations that could help anchor our understanding of its redistributive system. The proto-cuneiform evidence provides important clarification here.

Proto-cuneiform has a system for counting days, months, and years. The time and grain notation systems show an interlocked design, in which a month (30 days) is associated with a ‘standard’ grain distribution rate of 30N_30a (=1N₁). Compare the sign for one month (of 30 days) and for 30 proto-cuneiform ‘daily distributions’:

A proto-cuneiform tablet shows a calculation that confirms that 1N30_a was considered a ‘daily rate’.Footnote ²⁴ It marks this rate with an icon of a well-known archaeological find, the bevel-rim bowl, which symbolised food distributions to workers. This type of bowl is found in large numbers across West Asia beginning in the mid fourth millennium. Groups of bowls are sometimes found stacked neatly in rows, including at Susa in the centuries before proto-Elamite (Figure 16). A popular theory is that these bowls were bread moulds (e.g. Chazan & Lehner Reference Chazan and Lehner1990); however, barley is not often valued for leavened bread-making, and the bowls may not often be closely associated with ovens. It is possible that they served uncooked food, beer, porridges, or stews (Pollock Reference Pollock2012; Perruchini et al. Reference Perruchini2023). Perhaps liquids or fats were added to roasted barley flour to make easy and nutritious no-cook dumplings or broths, similar to foods made from the Tibetan roasted barley-flour staple called tsampa or Ethiopian besso or chuko.Footnote ²⁵ Bevel-rim bowls were likely used for feeding groups of workers on-site or in other communal eating contexts.

Figure 16

Bevel-rim bowls from Susa’s Acropolis, level 19.

Image courtesy of Le Brun (2019: plate 7).

The invention of writing is often taken as an important marker of increasingly ‘complex’ societies. N. Yoffee (Reference Yoffee2001), drawing on anthropologist J. C. Scott’s book Seeing like a State (1998), proposed that actually ‘what occurs in [ancient] “complex societies” is a tendency toward standardization, legibility, and simplification’. A significant sign of the ‘standardization’ of human experience in proto-Elamite is that we find a repeated ratio of 15 ‘proto-Elamite litres’ of grain between suspected ‘human’ signs and grain capacity measures,Footnote ²⁶ especially for M388 ‘men’ and M54 ‘yoked’ workers. In one tablet we find this ratio holds for 2,531 counted M54.Footnote ²⁷ Other ratios can also be found, such as 6 litres for some M388 personnel or M54.Footnote ²⁸

Although the social and material interpretations of the standard rates mostly escape us, their very existence reveals writing as a tool involved in fixing resource distribution. ‘Redistributive’ behaviour is a characteristic feature of societies that adopted cuneiform writing across the broader region in the Bronze Age (Renger Reference 110Renger2005). It refers to the collection and then disbursement of materials and products, above all barley grain, often issued to personnel in standardised amounts or according to their social status. This was organised by large households in Mesopotamia, including the ‘household of the god’ (cultic institutions) and the palace. In many respects, proto-Elamite accounting has proven a remarkable mirror to contemporaneous and later Mesopotamian redistributive practices. But unfortunately we do not have a developed vocabulary to describe the proto-Elamite social units that organised this behaviour, and the neutral label ‘institution’ is often used.

Even without an explicit proto-Elamite timekeeping system, the conceptual integration of its numerical systems is apparent. Some tablets use multiple numerical systems but are summarised in just one system.Footnote ²⁹ The implied relationships between different numerical systems reveal proto-Elamite writing as a project of not only tracking but also standardising relationships between people, their time/labour, and the material goods they produced or consumed.

A reflection of the underlying system rationale is the fact that non-numerical signs could also carry implied quantitative values (de Mecquenem Reference de Mecquenem1949; Friberg Reference Friberg1978: 34). This is most clear in product signs counted in the bisexagesimal system. For example, means ‘one-half proto-Elamite litre’ as a numerical sign, but when used non-numerically (labelled M354), it refers to a loaf of bread or similar that requires a litre of grain to make. Other object signs carry numerical values as well: a striped, spouted vessel icon (M265), counted in the sexagesimal system for objects, can be shown to have an implied value of ¼ proto-Elamite litre, as shown by a tablet’s summary line in the capacity system (Figure 17). Damerow and Englund (Reference Damerow and Englund1989: 86) compared this sign to trough-spouted vessels of Susa II/III date excavated at several proto-Elamite sites (see Mutin Reference Mutin2013: 70–71). If the comparison holds, it would be a wonderful way to approximately anchor proto-Elamite capacity measures to modern values.Footnote ³⁰

Figure 17

Count of undeciphered products with assumed grain equivalencies in the bisexagesimal and/or sexagesimal system, summarised in the capacity system. Left: Tablet MDP 6, 388/P008168, author’s drawing. Top right: Vessel from Susa (Le Breton Reference Le Breton1957: fig. 13). Bottom right: Vessel from Tepe Sialk AO 17866 © GrandPalaisRmn (musée du Louvre)/Stéphane Maréchalle.

5.4 Non-numerical Signs

Can we tease apart the hundreds of proto-Elamite signs into different functional groups? Among the non-numerical signs, we can make a functional distinction between ‘object’ signs and ‘owner’ signs (Dahl Reference Dahl, Hawkins, Kelley and Garcia-Ventura2018). The difference is that object signs bear a direct relationship with the numerical notation (‘10 sheep’), while ‘owner’ signs bear an oblique one (‘10 sheep for/from/belonging to the chief shepherd/George/the ruler’s house). This is a functional rather than categorical distinction: some signs used to designate persons as owners, including M388 (‘man’?) (e.g. in association with grain distributions), can also be used as ‘object’ signs in counts of personnel.

Disentangling different categories of signs used in ‘owner’ sequences is one of the most interesting decipherment challenges. What different kinds of information were included in order to identify people? Some signs that are often used independently appear to be ideograms for ‘worker categories’ and others may have been administrative or social designations of different kinds. The hypothesis that a special set of signs was used to write personal names at least partly through their sounds is discussed in Section 5.6. Finally, certain signs appearing often at the beginning of texts, called ‘headers’, may contain special kinds of social group or economic unit information (Section 5.5.1).

An important outstanding question is the range of meanings that an individual sign could have. The principle of using signs in more than one way is clear from non-numerical uses of numerical signs. The sign for ‘100’ (N₂₃) is used non-numerically (M387) as a social designation (and see earlier, M354). Ideographic multivalency among non-numerical signs is hard to identify. In later cuneiform, signs could have multiple related ideographic values, as well as being freed from their ideographic meaning to be used only for syllabic values. Since virtually all of the proposed ‘syllabary’ signs of Dahl (Reference Dahl2019) (Section 5.6) can sometimes appear as single-sign entries, they may have been co-opted from their use as ‘object’ signs.

No proto-Elamite signs for ‘actions’ have been identified, such as ‘to distribute’ or ‘to collect’. It is possible, even likely, that this information is implied by the way writing and keeping tablets were embedded in social situations and spaces and followed a limited set of conventions, like sealing and token technologies before them, or that some action information was encoded within object signs by convention (e.g. hypothetically, ‘grain distribution’).Footnote ³¹

5.5 Tablet Format and Syntax

Proto-Elamite was written in straight rows consisting of uninterrupted sequences of non-numerical signs followed by numerical signs, combinations we call ‘entries’. By modern publication convention,Footnote ³² sequences are read in columns top to bottom and left to right (Figure 18). Seal impressions show that, actually, tablets were written or read turned ninety degrees clockwise from this, with the script running right to left in rows from top to bottom. Entries can run from one row/column to the next (e.g. entry 2, Figure 18). Tablets vary in size and complexity, ranging from a single entry to dozens. The text can also continue onto the reverse of the tablet (occasionally first onto the edge) by rotating along its horizontal axis: imagine a hotdog pierced through its whole length rotating on a spit.Footnote ³³ Summary lines appear on many tablets, always on the reverse and at the opposite side and orientation from any spill-over text or, rarely, centred on the reverse.

Figure 18

A late(?) proto-Elamite roster of ten chief overseers counted in the decimal system, MDP 31, 43/P009382.

Author’s drawing.

Although proto-Elamite’s straight sequences of signs look rather like something that could, in our minds, ‘spell’ words ordered into sentences, much of the ‘syntax’ (the sign-ordering principles) that we can already observe in proto-Elamite expresses relationships between ideograms that are more akin to the logic of a spreadsheet. Indeed, neighbouring proto-cuneiform did not yet arrange signs in straight lines, but rather combined them non-linearly in boxes and sometimes sub-cases, handy for the account’s reference (Dahl Reference Dahl2005b: fig. 5). For the decipherer, this means that proto-Elamite sign sequences must be mined for administrative hierarchies, and longer sequences in particular must be parsed with awareness of their context in the tablet. The following section illustrates some elements of tablet-wide and entry-level syntax that have so far been identified.

5.5.1 Headers and Subscripts

A ‘header’ is the first sign or first few signs of a tablet (Born et al. Reference Born, Monroe, Kelley and Sarkar2022) which provide global account information. It can be difficult to determine where the header ends and the first entry begins. The end of the first entry of a tablet can also include a counted object sign that is assumed in the remaining entries of the text (Figure 18). Out of around 800 tablets in proto-Elamite with the first entry preserved, about 120 probably do not have a header. Tablets without headers are typically short tallies of objects in which the first entry is a single sign representing the first counted object. Some headers consist of a counted object sign used as a tablet-wide label, such as M288 (grain container) or M388 (a category of person).

Figure 19

The most common signs used as tablet headers.

Adapted from results presented in Monroe et al. (2025).

Some signs are commonly used as headers (Figure 19), but header signs are not at all a clean subset of the system, as they can be found in other positions in texts as well (see Section 5.5.2). The range of information that headers represent is uncertain. One header stands apart: close to 300 tablets begin with M157, which has been compared to the cuneiform sign DUB ‘tablet, account’. We do not yet understand what the presence or absence of M157 indicates. A machine-learning study of the numerical systems shows that M157 is not strongly predictive of any system.Footnote ³⁴ M157 can be filled with or followed by various other ‘owner’ signs, including the hairy triangle, which contributes to the impression of its relative neutrality in terms of social information.

However, the working hypothesis is that most header signs represent households or economic units (e.g. the ‘hairy triangle’ M136, Section 6.5). Yet signs like M59, also found as a header, are elsewhere taken to be administrative titles (Section 7.2), and it is not yet clear how to distinguish between signs for officials as opposed to institutions. It is at least possible that some suspected institution signs may reflect administrative or social contexts such as agricultural events (harvest, sowing) or festivals.Footnote ³⁵ Another possibility, that some signs or sequences could reflect toponyms, such as field names or settlements, has not been directly explored.

Around a hundred tablets record a ‘subscript’, that is, a string of signs appearing after the last numerical notation in a text. Almost all of these are small rectangular tablets, but although some are closely related, the contents and formats of others vary, and they can be sealed or unsealed. The kinds of information that subscripts might contain have not been subject to study.

5.5.2 Object Hierarchies and Nested Categorisation

Some tablets list things (objects, animals, or humans) that are introduced in consecutive entries in a standard order. Dahl (Reference Dahl2005a) interpreted the order in which female, male, and young animals appear in animal herding texts to reflect the principle of listing the most important economic items first (e.g. nanny goats as producers of vital dairy products). The object hierarchy principle can also be seen in a tablet recording undeciphered (perhaps grain-based?) products or ingredients (Figure 20). By applying recurrence encodings to the corpus,Footnote ³⁶ one can gain a quick view of repeated object sequences in tablets. The sheep and goat texts are by far the clearest, but other object hierarchies can also be found that have yet to be explored, including M81–M36–M311.

Figure 20

A schematic representation of information from MDP 17, 81+347 (Figure 29), recording groups of undeciphered, probably grain-based, products introduced in a standard order.

Figure 20 Long description

The entries of a proto-Elamite tablet have been extracted, with numerical notations removed, so that the consistent hierarchical ordering of products in the tablet is visible. The table shows eight series, with the signs used in each. No exceptions to the sign hierarchies in each sequence are found, though in some series, a sign is missing (skipping to the next in the hierarchy).

The principle also applies to humans, as shown especially clearly in a text studied by L. Hawkins (Reference Hawkins2015), where different types of workers are introduced in an established order (Figure 21A).Footnote ³⁷

By combining the evidence of syntax within tablets with the distribution of different sign groups between tablets, we can partly reconstruct hierarchies in administrative personnel. We can place M388 ‘man/person’, M124 ‘overseers’, and, it seems below them, the ‘stick’ M3, and the ‘yoke’ M54 in the middle range of an administrative personnel hierarchy. These signs mark the heads of work groups where they are accompanied by strings of signs that might record their names (Section 5.5.3), while the ‘work groups’ themselves consist of the basic worker signs including ‘females’ M72, who remain unnamed (Dahl, Hawkins & Kelley Reference Dahl, Hawkins, Kelley and Garcia-Ventura2018).

Another syntactical feature that helps us categorise signs is summary lines, which show that some signs can be macro-categories for others. For example, the worker text studied by Hawkins totals M3 under the count of M54. The undeciphered sign M376 (perhaps a worker or an animal) similarly appears to be a macro-category of at least five other signs.Footnote ³⁸

5.5.3 Entry-Level Syntax

An entry gives one or more types of information in relation to its following numerical notation.Footnote ³⁹ So far as we can tell, entry-level syntax dictates that ‘owner’ designations will precede ‘object’ designations if both are present (Englund Reference Englund and Houston2004), so that entries may consist of:

• a sign or signs identifying the counted objectFootnote ⁴⁰

• a sign or signs describing the ‘owner’, or other oblique context description, of an unwritten counted object. The unwritten object may be grain measured in capacities or other items, animals, or humans; sometimes the counted object is explicitly stated in the introductory line of the tablet (e.g. Figure 18)

• a sign or signs describing the ‘owner’/oblique information, followed by a sign or signs for the counted object.

Entry-level syntax is also observable in List A (Section 6.5), which records administrative units and/or administrators’ titles. In this tablet, signs commonly appearing in other tablets as headers, such as the ‘hairy triangle’ (M136) and a mountain motif (M383), consistently precede one of several worker category signs (Figure 21C/D).Footnote ⁴¹

In fact, when signs that are often found in headers appear instead in other entries of a text, they are regularly the first sign in that entry, demonstrating that they are at the ‘top’ of a syntactical hierarchy at both the tablet level and entry level. This gives the impression that the syntax of some entries may reflect a compression of information that could be spread across an entire document elsewhere. A simple demonstration of this is found in an identical count of goats found on a related ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ document (Figure 21B): in the primary document, an ‘owner’ sign is used as the tablet heading, followed by the ‘nanny goat’ sign. When the scribe copied this information into a compiled account with other animal tally tablets, they used a complex grapheme with the owner sign inscribed inside the nanny goat sign. This also shows that at least some complex graphemes can be alternate renderings of their two components in sequence.

Other aspects of entry-level syntax are discernible within the ‘overseer’ designations in long worker team and ration texts. Each group of workers is preceded by an entry with a much longer string of signs which have been interpreted as the names and/or titles of overseers. These sequences follow one of three patterns (Figure 21C) (Dahl, Hawkins & Kelley Reference Dahl, Hawkins, Kelley and Garcia-Ventura2018: figs 5–7):

• begin with M124 and sometimes end with M3_b

• begin with M388 and sometimes end with M3_b or M54 Footnote ⁴²

• or end with M54

Although M3 and M54 are person-category signs that describe overseers who are structurally parallel to overseers described as M124 and M388, these signs must be used in a different position in sign strings – after as opposed to before the more diverse set of signs that form the candidate ‘names’ (‘RS2 signs’, see later).

Figure 21

Examples of syntactical patterns in proto-Elamite. A: Tablet-level hierarchies. B: Tablet-level to entry-level syntax. C: Syntactical patterns for overseers in entries. D: Syntax in entries from the unique List A.

A final example of entry-level syntax relates to the posited recording of personal names. As far as we can tell, sometimes proto-Elamite entries record only ‘names’. Often, however, these names follow the ‘man’ sign M388, M124, or other signs. Names may also precede counted object signs such as vessels. For example, at Tepe Yahya, a text may record M388 class owners by name along with small numbers of sheep for each (between 2 and 32).Footnote ⁴³

Meriggi (Reference Meriggi1971: §92) adopted Scheil’s suggestion to read M388 as ‘son’, identifying hypothetical patronymics (‘X son X’) in longer sequences with M388 in the middle. But it now seems clear that the signs preceding M388 are of a distinct nature from those that follow and probably do not write personal names, at least not with phonetic spellings. Dahl, Petrie, and Potts (Reference Dahl, Petrie, Potts and Petrie2013) proposed the terminology ‘restricted signary 1’ (RS1) for M388 and the suspected administrative title or other social identifier signs that can precede it and ‘restricted signary 2’ (RS2) for the suspected personal names that follow.Footnote ⁴⁴ The signs before M388 overlap, to as yet uncertain degree, with ‘header’ signs, and they can be used independently and in patterns suggesting ideographic values. One possibility is that these relate to social group affiliations (Dahl, Petrie & Potts Reference Dahl, Petrie, Potts and Petrie2013; Afshari and Yousefi Zoshk Reference Afshari and Yousefi Zoshk2022). Although there is not a clean division between RS1 and RS2 signs, there are distinct trends in sign use; the two proposed sets require more investigation.

5.6 The Phonetic Sign Hypothesis

Proto-Elamite sequences of signs are significantly longer than in proto-cuneiform (Englund Reference Englund and Houston2004). Entries can be up to twelve signs long (though rare); later proto-Elamite tablets may have longer sequences than earlier ones (Dahl, Petrie & Potts Reference Dahl, Petrie, Potts and Petrie2013). It is, more than anything, the length and linearity of sequences that have led scholars to propose that proto-Elamite developed a set of syllabic signs, in what would be the earliest known attempt in history to systematically convey the sounds of language with symbols.

The search for sound-signs has focused on the hypothesis that personal names were recorded in these long entries. In Meriggi’s (Reference Meriggi1971: 30) opinion, one would have to be ‘climbing glass’ (arrampicarsi sui vetri!) to find a reasonable explanation other than the spelling of personal names in long sign strings.Footnote ⁴⁵ However, it is still possible to contend that some long sequences are complex object or administrative designations.

It has been suggested that names may be written syllabically (ro-sa-an) or in a mixed ideo/logographic and syllabic way (-an) (Desset Reference Desset2012: 53). There are many issues to disentangle. Most fundamentally, were they writing personal names? Probably. If so, were they sometimes using sound-signs to do so? Many names in Sumerian and Akkadian are short sentences or common words, and names could be written wholly logographically in cuneiform. In many writing systems, including cuneiform, it has been suggested that one stimulus for syllabic writing may have been the attempt to render words or names in languages different from that which the script was designed to record. The possible stimuli for writing names phonetically as opposed to ideographically in the context of a ‘pristine’ invention of writing, unfamiliar with developed glottography, demand a much fuller discussion, and we can expect to see research along these lines in the near future.Footnote ⁴⁶ Finally, were sound values for signs standardised or made up on the go by scribes?

Meriggi (Reference Meriggi1971) proposed around 50 ‘syllabic’ signs, while Dahl (Reference Dahl2019) offers a list of 61 common signs, speculating a full list may include fewer than 100 (Dahl Reference Dahl, Hawkins, Kelley and Garcia-Ventura2018; cf. Dahl Reference Dahl, Petrie, Potts and Petrie2013).Footnote ⁴⁷ F. Desset (Reference Desset2012, Reference Desset2016: figure 18) listed nearly 200 signs that are suspected to be used for writing names and suggests that at least 24 of these, which are found doubled, probably have syllabic values. H. Afshari and R. Yousefi Zoshk (Reference Afshari and Yousefi Zoshk2022) refer to (without listing) 166 syllabic candidates (perhaps 100 once variants are reduced).

A key indicator for the existence of personal names has been the very common sign M388 (‘man’) discussed earlier, which often precedes, or appears in the middle of, many of the longer proto-Elamite sequences. It is not, however, entirely simple to extract candidate names (Desset Reference Desset2012: tables 1–6 list possible names). For example, the tablet in Figure 18 seems to count ‘named’ M388 ‘men’ using multi-sign strings, but at least one of the ‘names’ is simply a worker category sign, M203_a (Dahl, Hawkins & Kelley Reference Dahl, Hawkins, Kelley and Garcia-Ventura2018: fig. 6). Across the corpus, not all possible name sequences are associated with the sign M388. For example, the complex designations associated with M124 ‘overseers’ in long ration texts and other contexts are among the suspected personal names (Afshari & Yousefi Zoshk Reference Afshari and Yousefi Zoshk2022: fig. 5, MDP 6, 292).Footnote ⁴⁸

Digital tools to study sign sequences confirm that the corpus does not attest to common sequences of three or more signs (Born et al. Reference Born, Kelley, Kambhatla, Chen and Sarkar2019).Footnote ⁴⁹ This limited repetition had caused Meriggi (Reference Meriggi1971–1974: 175) to despair of identifying familiar Elamite personal names. Desset (Reference Desset2012: 55–56, Reference Desset2016: 84) proposed a path to decipherment through comparing Old Akkadian period names attested at Susa to hypothetical proto-Elamite names but admitted no initial success. The second most common three-sign sequence M97_h M4 M218 (read here right to left: ), found up to thirteen times, is a good ‘personal name’ candidate (Dahl Reference Dahl, Petrie, Potts and Petrie2013: fig. 13.4). Among other contexts, the name appears in several tablets counting vessels (M263) and grain-based products, suggesting that ‘Mr/Ms. M97_h M4 M218’ (if indeed a name) is a recipient of beer(?) and foodstuffs. One sequence with the ‘name’ can be tentatively parsed as follows:Footnote ⁵⁰

• M305 M388 M240 M97_h M4 M218 M263

• RS1 signs RS2 signs Object sign (vessel)

Identifying names in neighbouring proto-cuneiform has also been problematic. Personal names of both slaves and administrators are thought to be recorded, but ‘reading’ proto-cuneiform names in Sumerian (or any language) has remained difficult (Englund Reference Englund2009). Moreover, it can be hard to distinguish between administrative titles and names. This is an indication that we need to develop more sophisticated approaches to analysing social designations in both of these societies. At present, we are on safer ground referring to the hypothetical name sequences in question as ‘personnel designations’.

It is striking that in the archaic cuneiform texts from the city of Ur, a few centuries after proto-cuneiform, writing in Iraq had been largely transformed. Its administrative complexity was significantly reduced (Dahl Reference Dahl2025: 305), and texts shifted focus very heavily onto writing personal names, mostly Sumerian and using primarily logographic spellings (a sign for a whole word) with some grammatical morphemes. It is possible that late proto-Elamite was heading in a similar direction to the texts from Ur, perhaps also using tablets in administrative contexts in which naming persons was of high importance.

Meriggi (Reference Meriggi1971: 173 ff.) observed that six signs from his list of syllabic candidates were very commonly found in sequence-ending positions and therefore might represent grammatical suffixes. Sign clustering algorithms flag these five signs as especially strongly related, confirming distinctive commonalities in their uses (Born et al. Reference Born, Kelley, Kambhatla, Chen and Sarkar2019). We should at least consider the fact that one of the best identified syntactical features of proto-Elamite is that signs appearing consistently before numerical notations are counted objects. All of these signs can appear solo in entries as well, suggesting they were sometimes counted objects.

Desset et al. (Reference Desset, Tabibzadeh, Kervran, Basello and Marchesi2022: fig. 7) proposed a mapping from Linear Elamite signs to proto-Elamite in which five of these very common proto-Elamite signs are assigned vowel values of Linear Elamite characters (M218 = a, M371 = u₂/w, M96 = e, and M57 = u, and both M66 and M131 = i)!

A key document for those authors is a tablet from Susa of unknown date (Scheil Reference Scheil1935, text M) which they read as an early Linear Elamite learner’s exercise,Footnote ⁵¹ one line listing vowels e – u₂ – u– a – and perhaps i and another line m-me-mu₂-ma-mi. Given the many intervening centuries between proto-Elamite accounts and the Linear Elamite inscriptions, and their very different form and function, sign shape parallels do not themselves offer convincing evidence for proto-Elamite sign values. For example, Desset et al. (Reference Desset, Tabibzadeh, Kervran, Basello and Marchesi2022) equated both M131 and M66 with a Linear Elamite sign with the value i. However, the two proto-Elamite signs are used quite differently from each other: M131 typically appears near the beginning of sequences and M66 at the end, and they are very far apart in sign clustering results (Born et al. Reference Born, Kelley, Kambhatla, Chen and Sarkar2019). New evidence from within proto-Elamite syntax will have to be brought forth to interrogate the role of Meriggi’s common sequence-ending signs in proto-Elamite.

The ‘phonetic name’ hypothesis can be put in context within the decipherment project: candidate names in proto-Elamite do not make up nearly as significant a portion of corpus content as in the Ur texts. A maximal representation of syllabic writings based on Dahl’s syllabic candidates shows only around 50 per cent of tablets contain at least one candidate syllabic sign, though a ‘token count’ shows those signs to represent around 20 per cent of the non-numerical content.Footnote ⁵² This is an overestimate of potential ‘syllabism’ because, as mentioned earlier, the syllabic candidates may often be repurposed object/owner ideograms.

6.1 Agricultural Production

According to the evidence from Chogha Mish in the Susiana plain, peas and lentils were especially important domesticates for the early populations of Susiana, and flax, a source of oil as well as fibres for textiles, was regularly exploited and clearly domesticated by the late fourth millennium (Woosley Reference Woosley, Delougaz and Kantor1996). Susa itself was moderately well placed for a barley-based economy: rain-fed agriculture was just possible, and it could be supplemented with easy irrigation from the Karkheh River, which ran above the level of the plain in the vicinity of Susa. The land around Susa may also have benefited from good drainage (Hole et al. Reference Hole1969). However, the fragile position of agriculture is illustrated by much later seventh century BCE reports of famine in Susiana caused by extreme drought, which resulted in Elamites seeking grain deliveries from neighbouring states (Gorris Reference 104Gorris2023).

In Susiana, barley became the most important crop towards the end of the fourth millennium, probably both as staple food and animal fodder (Miller Reference Miller1984), supplemented by wheats, including einkorn and emmer, and oats. Both wheat and barley seeds were found in the proto-Elamite occupation of Tal-e Malyan (Miller Reference Miller1982), while proto-Elamite Tepe Yahya experienced a notable ‘proliferation of wheats’ (Meadow Reference Meadow, Lamberg-Karlovsky and Beale1986). This evidence complements the impression that proto-Elamite writing seems to be designed most of all to manage grain production and distribution. The relationship is underscored by a proto-Elamite seal that shows a bovine scribe kneeling with its back to a grain silo (see later, Figure 26). Behind the administrator is a bevel-rim bowl (Section 5.3.2). In proto-cuneiform script, this bowl becomes the icon for grain distributions, but proto-Elamite uses a different sign, M288 , before grain measures. Its shape is difficult to interpret: perhaps it depicts a container or a tall silo similar to one depicted on a painted sherd or on seals from Susiana just prior to the invention of writing.Footnote ⁵³

A unique tablet shows us that at a foundational stage in the development of proto-Elamite,Footnote ⁵⁴ one scribe was concerned with the management of a substantial tract of land near Susa, perhaps about 518 acres (Englund Reference Englund and Houston2004: 118). This is the only proto-Elamite tablet using the area measure system, which is better documented in proto-cuneiform. The text uniquely places the only ideographic sign (the very common ‘header’ M157) at the end of the text as if it were a colophon in proto-cuneiform. The tablet surely belongs to the elusive arena of direct contact between early proto-Elamite and proto-cuneiform.Footnote ⁵⁵

A ‘plough’ icon M56 is among the clearest evidence for agricultural management in proto-Elamite. Counts of in relation to grain show a ratio of 12 proto-Elamite litres per plough, such as one count of 111½ ‘plough’ (the plough can also be counted in halves) and 1,338 proto-Elamite litres under the authority of a ‘curved horn’ institution (Section 7.4).Footnote ⁵⁶ Damerow and Englund (Reference Damerow and Englund1989: 57–58) argued that absolute quantity estimates place this number in the ballpark range of grain used to seed fields of the standard Sumerian field size of 1 iku (approximately 0.8 modern acres), and that the plough may therefore represent a standard proto-Elamite field size as reckoned by its seeding requirements. This idea finds intriguing corroboration in Akkadian cuneiform texts from Susa of the Old Babylonian period, more than a thousand years later. Scribes in Susa at that time did not adopt the normal Babylonian area system for describing the size of agricultural fields in sale and lease documents, instead referring to field sizes implicitly through the amount of seed needed for its cultivation (De Graef Reference De Graef, Tavernier, Gorris, Abraham and Boschloos2018; Dahl Reference 102Dahl, Maiocchi and NotiziaForthcoming).

Texts using the plough sign give us a sense that tablets could be written to record grain expenditures from storehouses at sowing time. At least one simple tablet records grain for personnel separately from the grain for seeding and then totals the two amounts of grain on the reverse.Footnote ⁵⁷ It is difficult to identify whether writing played any role in harvest work. If the plough sign always reflects seeding expenditure (as the icon suggests), then grain amounts imply that sometimes large areas of land are being managed, such as the tablet in Figure 22, which records over 14,000 proto-Elamite litres of barley among five agricultural areas indicated by the sign M391 (Dahl Reference Dahl2005a: 88–89). Around thirty tablets record the sign M391, which could be a representation of four agricultural districts extending outwards from Susa (Dahl Reference 102Dahl, Maiocchi and NotiziaForthcoming, who draws comparison to the division of land around Old Babylonian Susa).

The fields in the tablet in Figure 22 are not differentiated from each other by name, raising suspicion that the text could be an exercise or preparatory calculation. But it also bears the impression of a seal belonging to an important institution, associated with the hairy triangle and plant motif M136_g (Section 6.5). Friberg (Reference Friberg1978: 18) saw this text as a typical example of an odd phenomenon that he found in both proto-cuneiform and proto-Elamite, what he called ‘almost round numbers’ (Friberg Reference Friberg1997), which tend to appear in large capacity measure totals. By this, he meant notations that are only slightly off from a neat milestone in the numerical system. For example, (transliterated N34) represents a ‘round’ number of 5,400 of the basic proto-Elamite litre (N30_c), while a sum slightly short of that would need to be written like this:Footnote ⁵⁸

Friberg concluded that the messy ‘tail’ of smaller numerical signs, just a sliver off from a round notation, in the (partly reconstructed) total of the tablet in Figure 22 suggests that ‘[an unwritten round] total was the given number and that, therefore, the text … is occupied either with splitting up a given quantity in several smaller quantities or with adding several smaller quantities, with the aim of filling up a given quota.’ While we can’t yet really understand how the scribes drew up this text, the example illustrates how the numerical information and social contexts of proto-Elamite writing must be deciphered in conjunction with one another.

Figure 22

MDP 6, 221/P008020 A record of seed for ploughing(?) five large agricultural areas. The same seal is found on the large unstudied tablet in Figure 1.

Author’s drawing, seal art by E. Miller.

Several uses of the ‘plough’ sign in the small corpus from Tepe Yahya show that agricultural management was important to that local scribal community. Interestingly, derived capacity measures are over-represented at Yahya, possibly hinting at local agricultural regimes (a focus on wheats in addition to barley?), though we would need more texts to draw firm conclusions. Evidence for agricultural management in the small group of Tal-e Malyan texts is less explicit – no ‘plough’ or M391 ‘field’ is found – but agricultural management may be implied by the yoke sign and grain capacity measures.

6.2 Sheep and Goats

The signs for sheep and goats, as well as dairy products associated with these animals, have been identified using the correlative methodology described in Section 4.5 (Dahl Reference Dahl, Hawkins, Kelley and Garcia-Ventura2018: fig. 13.6). Later Mesopotamian animal herding accounting practices help make sense of proto-Elamite accounting. Herders may have been responsible for groups of animals to be returned seasonally, along with set rates of products, to a household authority represented by the scribe. Some tablets count animals, while others count animals and their products, including dairy oils as well as other undeciphered signs that may represent sheep’s wool, goat hair, and hides, among other things. The many different vessel signs totalled separately in one large herding text show that proto-Elamite uses a complex set of terminologies for dairy products.Footnote ⁵⁹ These probably include longer-life products such as dried cheeses and clarified butter, as in Mesopotamia (Dahl Reference Dahl2005a: 115). Dahl (Reference Dahl2005b) identified some accounts as ‘annual’, judging by the estimated capacity of 1–2 litres of probable dried cheese or oil (M106) per animal and comparing this to annual quotas in later cuneiform sources. Scribes may have also kept ‘running accounts’ of flocks over seasons or years, recording herd contents by sex, age, and species (sheep or goat) (Dahl Reference Dahl2005a: §4.7).

Only one fragmentary tablet may explicitly record grain feed for sheep (Damerow & Englund Reference Damerow and Englund1989: fn. 147),Footnote ⁶⁰ where an even rate of 60 proto-Elamite litres per animal is recorded. This is precisely four times the commonly found rate of M54 men to grain. Without knowing the time period involved, we cannot extrapolate further meaning.

A rough estimate of the importance of documenting livestock in proto-Elamite is offered by Topic Modelling algorithms used to search for distinctive text groups (Born et al. Reference Born, Kelley, Kambhatla, Chen and Sarkar2019): sheep and goat signs and some of their products are the predominant focus of two related groups of about 100 and 50 texts, or about 10 per cent of known tablets. From Tepe Yahya, only one tablet explicitly records sheep, and no goat accounts are found.Footnote ⁶¹ The sheep are not distinguished by sex or age but counted with the basic (female adult) sign M346, in groups from 2 to 32+, assigned to M388-category ‘owners’.

6.3 Other Animals

Signs for fish and bird resources, surely important to proto-Elamite communities, have not been identified. The only identified bird icon is likely a social identity (Table 2, bottom right). By comparison, both birds and fish appear abundantly in proto-cuneiform writing in recognisable iconic forms. At Uruk, fish products were especially important locally and for trade (Englund Reference Englund, Attinger and Wäfler1998: 128–134).

Pigs and cattle herding are documented in proto-cuneiform, identifiable by animal head icons, but neither animal has been identified in proto-Elamite writing. Frequent depictions of cattle in proto-Elamite seals suggest that the animals were highly valued in proto-Elamite culture. Domestic cattle (Bos taurus) are found in Khuzestan from the early fifth millennium BCE (Potts Reference Potts2016: table 2.5). At both Tal-e Malyan and Tepe Yahya, zooarchaeological work shows domesticated cattle to be a small supplement to heavily goat- and sheep-based animal husbandry packages (Meadow Reference Meadow, Lamberg-Karlovsky and Beale1986; Zeder Reference Zeder1991). Pig figurines are known from Susa in the late fourth millennium BCE,Footnote ⁶² but pigs are rarely shown on seals. It is possible that pig herding was not tracked by scribal administrators (Dahl Reference Dahl, Petrie, Potts and Petrie2013) or that a marginalisation or avoidance of pig herding and consumption was culturally conditioned or limited by ecological conditions (Mashkour Reference Mashkour, Lion and Michél2006; Matthews and Nashli Reference Matthews and Fazeli Nashli2022: 233; Price Reference Price2021).

Equids (donkeys, onagers) might be shown in some proto-Elamite seal imagery, including as participants in scribal activity where, like the other animals, they strike anthropomorphic poses (Section 7, Figure 26). One clumsily executed tablet counts groups of equids with animal head icons,Footnote ⁶³ but equid head signs found in other tablets might represent social identities rather than animals. Onagers (Equus hemionus) are present in western Iran from as early as the eighth millennium BCE. The current view is that the domesticated donkey (Equus asinus) derives from Equus africanus and was introduced to Iraq and Iran out of Egypt during the fourth millennium, appearing at sites associated with the Uruk Phenomenon network. This raises the possibility that pack donkeys may have helped to intensify the movement of goods over long distances. A painted potsherd from the fifth millennium BCE Tol-e Nurabad in Fars (near Tal-e Malyan) seems to depict an early domesticated donkey acting as a pack animal,Footnote ⁶⁴ and it is possible that domesticated equids were used by societies of the Iranian plateau before the fourth millennium (Potts Reference Potts and Conrad2011).

6.4 Other Industries

In addition to the dairy vessel signs associated with animals, many other vessel signs are found that may represent other products (e.g. Dahl Reference Dahl2005a: fig. 4). Beer is a prime candidate, and Friberg (Reference Friberg1978: 23–34) identified a number of possible ‘bread-and-beer’ texts based on metrological clues and comparisons with proto-cuneiform. Wine and grape products were also present in western Iran during the fourth millennium and may have been highly valued products in inter-regional networks, but no proofs for interpreting signs as grape products have been proposed. Textile terminologies also remain unidentified in the tablets, although seal imagery from Susiana in the period just before the invention of proto-Elamite indicates considerable administrative interest in textile production, which presumably used both sheep’s wool and goat hair.

In the fourth millennium BCE, the introduction of the potter’s wheel increased production efficiency and standardisation of forms, while pyrotechnic advances, including the introduction of updraft furnaces in the proto-Elamite period, improved pottery firing, enabled ‘glazed-steatite’ seal-making, and drove a ‘quantum leap’ (Helwing Reference Helwing, Marro and Stöllner2021) in metallurgical technology, especially copper smelting. The proto-Elamite network included sites in the north-central Iranian plateau where there is considerable evidence of smelting and access to copper and silver deposits.

Metal objects are accounted for in a small number of proto-cuneiform tablets, but they have not been identified in proto-Elamite, although Scheil (Reference Scheil1923) proposed that some signs were metal products without devising proofs. It is nonetheless interesting that in later Elamite cuneiform administrative texts from Tal-e Malyan (later second millennium BCE) there is a relatively unusual focus on metal products (Stolper Reference Stolper1984). While trade in metal and the development of metallurgical technologies may have been an important factor in the dynamics of early Iranian societies and their relationships with lowland regions to the west (Matthews & Fazeli Nashli Reference Matthews and Fazeli Nashli2004), we have yet to identify evidence that the proto-Elamite tablets document the circulation of metal or finished metal goods.

There are many signs still to decipher. An ‘arrow’ icon(?),Footnote ⁶⁵ with a parallel in proto-cuneiform (Englund Reference Englund and Houston2004: fig. 5.14), perhaps counts arrows (or are they archers?), appearing in a large sexagesimal count alongside other signs which could be unidentified crafts.Footnote ⁶⁶ The script certainly still conceals many products and genres, although the evidence suggests a heavy emphasis on the redistribution of grain, dairy products, and the tracking of sheep, goats, and human workforce. Yet precisely what is happening with these resources is difficult to pinpoint. That is, we do not have a strong understanding of the social articulation of the recorded goods and people.

6.5 Personnel and Their Institutions

One of the most difficult and pressing decipherment challenges in proto-Elamite is understanding when and how humans and social units are recorded using signs and sequences for professions, administrative titles, specific individuals, kin-based households, supra-kin households (such as a ruling house or a religious household), or other kinds of economic units. In this brief Element we can only touch on a few questions of social identity in the writing system.

The ‘yoke’ sign is found in nearly 170 tablets, which may indicate that many personnel were involved in agricultural work (but see Section 5.3.1). Apart from livestock tending, we do not know what other kinds of workers may also have been managed by scribes. Nor do we understand the range of social conditions that governed the disbursement of goods from storehouses to individuals. In fact, the tablets themselves are, as far as we can tell, silent about the direction of the flow of goods, and Dahl (Reference Dahl2023) drew on the evidence of seal imagery, which shows the presentation of goods from one party to another, to raise the possibility that scribes might sometimes have been recording offerings brought into important households, rather than exclusively recording disbursements (see also Yousefi Zoshk, Afshari Salaki & Etemadifar Reference Yousefi Zoshk, Afshari Salaki and Etemadifar2025: 79). This remains one of many unexplored hypotheses.

Although a ‘female worker’ sign was deciphered through proto-cuneiform parallels (Section 4), much is not yet satisfactorily explained. In a genre of long ration texts (Dahl, Hawkins & Kelley Reference Dahl, Hawkins, Kelley and Garcia-Ventura2018), M72 ‘women’ appear in small teams of workers that can include male and female ‘children’ (M370_b+M388, M370_b+M72). The nearly exclusive use of the ‘children’ signs in texts with the ‘woman’ sign seems to corroborate their interpretation. Yet the ‘children’ in those texts do not directly follow the women as one might expect from historical cuneiform parallels. In Old Akkadian cuneiform monthly ration texts from Susa (c. 2350 BCE) which list women and girls under groups of overseers, women are described as weavers, bakers, water carriers, millers, and old women involved in grain grinding (Dabbagh Reference Dabbagh and Meyer2019). Perhaps similar female worker categories are to be found in the proto-Elamite texts.

M72 rarely appears with sign strings either before or after it in entries. That is, they are not ‘named’. D. Etemadifar and M. Afzadi (Reference Etemadifar and Afzadi2022) proposed understanding the ‘overseer’ sign M124 (Figure 21C),Footnote ⁶⁷ which does appear regularly ‘named’, as a sign for woman based on its parallel use to M388 (‘man’). However, it is difficult to find corroborating evidence for this. M124 has, thus far, been diversely translated, as Scheil’s ‘arrow’, Meriggi’s GAL (Sumerian for ‘big’), and Englund’s ‘high status human’.

Apart from its very limited use to designate male children (M370_b+M388), M388 is also used in a different sense, as a general person category found in nearly a quarter of all tablets. The centrality of M388 personnel to proto-Elamite administration is in stark contrast with the restricted use of the sign KUR in proto-cuneiform, which is taken to be M388’s graphical and partly semantic parallel. KUR may mean ‘male slave’ but the sign depicts a mountain.Footnote ⁶⁸ Assyriologists have long posited that the writing for female slave (SAL.KUR) originated as an ideogram meaning ‘mountain woman’ because lowlanders captured slaves from the mountains. It is tempting to see the geography of the proto-Elamite world, extending through the Zagros mountain ranges, as somehow playing a role in these shared signs KUR and M388, but just how remains difficult to trace. Proto-Elamite M388 is ‘upside down’ in relation to KUR and so does not visually link the proto-Elamite social category to mountains.Footnote ⁶⁹

M388 persons are a hallmark of the ‘decimal’ sphere of activity. Their status could span at least three administrative levels: unnamed ‘workers’, often named (or complexly designated) ‘overseers’ and ‘chief overseers’ (Figure 23). The most important chief overseer is listed first and is assigned ten overseers, who in turn are assigned ten workers each; this is an indication of how the ‘decimal sphere’ may reflect a planned system of organising personnel. The second chief overseer is assigned four overseers with ten workers each, but a final overseer is assigned only seven workers. The summary counts all personnel, including the overseers, as M388, and allots 15 proto-Elamite litres of grain to each.

Figure 23

Diagram of the hierarchical structure of MDP 6, 4997/P008185, which counts 164 M388 persons in the decimal system. The tablet provides some of the clearest evidence for Englund’s observation that proto-Elamite syntax reflects the organisation of labour units.

Conversely, the sexagesimal sphere of personnel is not marked by the sign M388. One especially important tablet counting with the sexagesimal system has only recently become available in reliable photographs, and a new drawing is provided here (Figure 24). Hereafter, List A is the only proto-Elamite tablet that bears some of the hallmark features of the important proto-cuneiform scholarly genre of list-making. In particular, the number following each entry is almost invariably ‘1’ (a few things are counted as ‘2’ and one as ‘21’), suggesting that it represents scribal reflection rather than a count deriving from a real administrative event. The tablet’s distinct vocabulary uses many ‘header’ signs and some ‘worker’ signs, but not M388. It summarises its count of 119 (personnel?) under the category M317, the basic ‘worker category’ sign at the top of the hierarchy of signs counted primarily in the decimal system (Figure 21A). It is this type of evidence that led Englund (Reference Englund and Houston2004: 112) to suggest that the difference between counting humans in the decimal system and the sexagesimal system was one of social status. Indeed, we can identify other instances of the blending of person-category signs from the top of the decimal sphere hierarchy into the sexagesimal sphere.Footnote ⁷⁰

Figure 24

MDP 26, 71/P008759 is a list of households and/or officials.

Author’s drawing, prepared from images provided courtesy of the National Museum of Iran.

Hierarchical organisation is thus abundant in proto-Elamite, but it is not easy to identify the nature of the authorities at the top. In addition, although writing is traditionally interpreted as evidence for ‘centralised’ authority, the proto-Elamite texts do not turn up a singular important household or clear candidates for a ruler’s name. This marks a contrast with early Egyptian writing, which appears closely associated with royal identity (Baines Reference Baines2010; Stauder Reference Stauder2026), and in some ways also with proto-cuneiform, in which by far the most common sign EN has been associated with the later-known Sumerian cultic and city-ruler title.Footnote ⁷¹

The very common sign M157, so far found only in texts from Susa, could represent either a specific authority or, alternately, an accounting terminology. It can be inscribed with various other signs. The so-called hairy triangle M136 may depict a banner or other heraldic object whose different variations (mostly simple line or dot designs, perhaps some plant references) mark specific households or administrative units (Lamberg-Karlovsky Reference Lamberg-Karlovsky1986; Dahl Reference Dahl, Petrie, Potts and Petrie2013: 249). An empty hairy triangle is also found inscribed inside a few ‘owner/institution’ signs, including M157.

Lamberg-Karlovsky (in Potts Reference Potts2001: 271) outlined the differing ways that scholars have imagined proto-Elamite political and cultural connections across sites. Did Susa (or less likely, Tal-e Malyan) exercise some form of political hegemony over other sites, or was each site a politically independent regional centre employing writing for its own institutions? Alternately, were sites connected by the existence of ‘numerous, loosely structured, decentralized tribal configurations’? Given these questions, it is interesting that the specific hairy triangle with a quadrilobe inside appears at Susa, Tal-e Malyan, and Tepe Yahya. This led Stolper (Reference Stolper1985: 9) to question whether the sign might represent ‘some regularity of recording technique [rather] than … uniformity of institutions’. The texts from Tepe Yahya use the hairy triangle especially frequently, both a quadrilobe and a trilobe variant , often as headers of short documents with few other ideograms and small capacity measures. A hairy triangle is also etched on a pot sherd from Tepe Yahya, a very rare example of proto-Elamite script outside of clay tablets (Mutin Reference Mutin2013: fig. 3.34).Footnote ⁷² A clay fragment (sealing?) from Tepe Sofalin also shows an etched hairy triangle (Yousefi Zoshk and Hessari, Reference Yousefi Zoshk and HessariForthcoming).

Seal iconography provides corroborating evidence that ‘hairy triangles’ represent important institutions. The seal impression in Figure 22 shows sitting above images of muscular anthropomorphic bulls and lions, each dominating a smaller version of the other, perhaps indicating interacting authorities (cf. Álvarez-Mon Reference Álvarez-Mon2020: 67). This same seal is rolled on the important tablet in Figure 1; the seal’s imagery and its use on high-level documents have led to speculation that it could be the seal of the ruler of Susa (Dahl Reference Dahl2019: 81).

As in the seal iconography, the way that different hairy triangle signs are used in texts seems to suggest the existence of multiple interacting authorities. For example, List A records fifteen hairy triangles, most of them containing a quadrilobe or another shape using the circular stylus (the specific forms are hard to identify). Only one entry, in an unremarkable position in the last quarter of the tablet, clearly uses the supposedly important household sign ! At least one other fragmentary tablet records both and ,Footnote ⁷³ recording humble bisexagesimal products. There is clearly still much to explore in relation to proto-Elamite ‘institution’ signs.

7.1 Seal-Bearers and Scribes

In contrast to the proto-cuneiform world from which we have no explicit images of scribal activity, the seal-carvers of Susiana were interested in depicting scribes or seal-bearing administrators in action (Pittman Reference Pittman, Frangipane, Hauptmann, Liverani, Matthiae and Mellink1993) – how very ‘meta’ of them! These scenes (Figure 26) hint at the kinds of administrative events at which tablets were inscribed and/or impressed with seals. In some scenes, one or more administrators – in fact, animals parading as humans – hold what are probably styli. An administrator can face a figure who presents or receives a tablet(?) in outstretched arms. The horned bovine as an official is sometimes positioned before granaries, while short-eared animals (equids?) are sometimes accompanied by curved-horn caprids holding administrative tools.

Figure 26

Administrative scenes depicted on seals. All but A (origin unknown) come from Susa. A: Amiet (Reference Amiet1980) no. 568 green heulandite seal. B: Amiet (Reference Amiet1980) no. 569 seal impression on tablet. C: MDP 43 no. 1007 seal impression on tablet. D: Amiet (Reference Amiet1980) no. 567 white stone seal. E: Amiet (Reference Amiet1980) no. 564 sealed tablets. F: MDP 43 no. 680 sealed clay ball, Susa II date (pre-proto-Elamite). G: Legrain (Reference Legrain1921) MDP 16, 274 sealing.

The collected imagery tells us that at least some acts of inscribing a tablet involved social interaction. That is, tablets were not only mnemonic devices for administrators to track and plan for future grain expenditures in the privacy of their own storerooms. Writing may have been part of social events, especially relating to the distribution or collection of resources, which it both legitimised and was legitimised by. As for whether tablets ever exchanged hands, and among what economic participants, this remains unknown. At Tepe Yahya, while tablets themselves were found scattered, a pile of perhaps eighty-five partly formed ‘tablet blanks’ was discovered in the corner of one room with restricted access (Figure 27).Footnote ⁷⁷ This is the closest we can yet come to pinpointing a physical location for scribal activity.

Paladre (Reference Paladre2022) has recently begun to interrogate the relationship between scribes and seal-bearers in proto-Elamite. With very few exceptions (e.g. a livestock scene impressed on a herding tablet), imagery on seals does not seem to bear a straightforward relationship to administrative topics in tablets (Dahl Reference Dahl2019: 91). Moreover, although header signs can appear in seals, it is almost never the case that a header sign on a tablet is shown in a seal design rolled on that tablet.Footnote ⁷⁸ Consequently, we cannot identify a straightforward system of authority. In future we can hope to better map the complex relationships between the institutions and officials by studying the signs for social identities in proto-Elamite writing in conjunction with the authorities represented by seals impressed on tablets, containers, and door locks. A crucial prerequisite to this kind of work is better documentation and integration of the corpus of seals and impressions with those of the inscriptions.

Figure 27

Tablet blanks found in a room at Tepe Yahya (Lamberg-Karlovsky & Kohl Reference Lamberg-Karlovsky and Kohl1971).

Image courtesy of Peabody Museum.

7.2 Types of Documents

Dahl (Reference Dahl2005b) proposed a basic categorisation of tablets into ‘receipts’ (primary documents) and ‘accounts’ (secondary documents) drawing on Mesopotamian bookkeeping parallels. The ways that smaller and larger documents are formatted strongly suggest that compiling took place, although only one actual example of this behaviour has been identified (Figure 21B). The use of institution signs (i.e. signs common in tablet headers) in later entries of some tablets might indicate that such tablets are compilations of primary documents cited by their header.Footnote ⁷⁹

Some short primary documents contain small numbers of animals or small grain distributions, but other equally small documents contain moderate or very large amounts of commodities, perhaps deliveries to officials for their own provisioning or for further distribution. For example, one tablet (Figure 30, left) counts 180 barley grain products (loaves of bread or similar) and 120 more perhaps of another grain; the only qualifying sign in the text is its header M327+M59 . The sign inscribed in the circle, M59 , is found in both early and standard/late tablets and appears to be a middling or high-level ‘official’. On another tablet,Footnote ⁸⁰ an M59 official is assigned 973 ‘workers’ of the M54 (‘yoked’) type, who are provisioned with 14,595 proto-Elamite litres of grain, that is, precisely the ‘standard rate’ of 15 litres per worker. A picture emerges of M59 as an individual responsible for provisioning ordinary workers with resources allotted to them in bulk from a scribe on behalf of a household.

A survey of tablet shapes (Figure 28) alongside the structure and content of proto-Elamite accounts reveals an intriguing situation: tablets cannot be described in a small number of simple administrative formulas. Differences in tablet shapes, contents, and structures within Susa may reflect different account levels, accounting topics, archival groups (scribal hands/peculiarities), or phases of the writing system. Unravelling these dimensions and subdividing the corpus will be key to the next phase of proto-Elamite studies. Overall, we get the impression that the technology was used for a wide variety of specific administrative tasks but perhaps within a fairly narrow range of industries. This seems to be corroborated by numerous measures when applying tools from Natural Language Processing to group tablets based on their contexts. Some types of records appear to be represented by only one or a few examples, while others find dozens of close parallels, though most very close parallels may belong to archival groups or even single administrative events. Yet across document types and even at sites of great geographic distance, core signs and accounting features were standardised.

Altogether this suggests that proto-Elamite writing represents a small group of users in close contact with one another, with scribal learning persisting over a few generations. Throughout this time, scribes may have continued exploring how to apply writing in the context of a range of different socio-administrative events or tasks. On the one hand, unique documents such as List A (Section 6.5) may highlight the partial representativeness of the tablets that have been discovered. But equally, singular exemplars may be witnesses to a high level of experimentation as scribes sought ways to ensure the social efficacy of the writing system.

Figure 28

A selection of tablet shapes and sizes in proto-Elamite.

Author’s drawings.

7.3 Reconstructing Archives

The lack of information on the circumstances of the Susa documents has significantly hindered decipherment efforts, and a more detailed reconstruction of archival and chronological groupings based on text features and the limited archaeological information should be a top priority for an integrated decipherment project. Various small archival groups have been identified based on sign use, tablet format, sealings, and scribal designs (Dahl Reference Dahl2005b, Reference Dahl2012b). For example, ten small and similarly shaped documents that might record ration distributions share some signs, have a similar structure (a very long first entry and a subscript), and have the same seal depicting a mythical beast (Dahl Reference Dahl, Hessari and Yousefi Zoshk2012b: 6, Reference Dahl2019: 92). Afshari and Yousefi Zoshk (Reference Afshari and Yousefi Zoshk2022) propose that the final subscript sign M153+M342 may represent a family or tribal group. Nine similar documents of another group (MDP 26, 36–45) are also linked by their subscript.

Some administrative topics and practices are solely or primarily represented in the known corpus by a small set of related documents. This is apparently the case with at least six bisexagesimal counts of products in vessels (and probably four more) that share a scribal design as well as a few rare signs (Dahl Reference Dahl2012a: 6) (Figure 29). The repetitive structure of one of these is mapped in Section 5, Figure 20. A closely related but much smaller document (Figure 29, right) counts the vessels found in this genre (in the same order!) and lists one of the same administrative units (M175+M136) found in the larger tablet’s header. These documents may have worked together at different stages in the management of a set of products.

Figure 29

Left: MDP 17, 81/P008279 is an account with a scribal design (SD1) belonging to a small archive. Drawing modified from Dahl (Reference Dahl2012b). Right: MDP 17, 125/P008323 (author’s drawing) shows a clear structural relationship to MDP 17, 81 but represents a different stage of bookkeeping activity.

A few other groups of clearly related documents have been identified so far,Footnote ⁸¹ but many others may exist. These groups illustrate that there are both considerable interconnections and also idiosyncrasies within the proto-Elamite corpus whose meaning is not easily grasped. Recent improvements in the accessibility of tablet images, transliterations, seal images, and other metadata should help bring the range of subgroups of the corpus into sharper focus.

7.4 The Activities of the ‘Horn’ Institution

No study has yet tried to track the industries or persons associated with different proto-Elamite ‘institution’ signs. One of the most frequently repeated institution signs is M327+M342 . This complex grapheme consists of M342 , probably depicting a curved goat horn, inside M327 , a fat cross with a circular centre. If the sign’s iconicity works in conjunction with seal imagery, we might speculate whether the horn references a scribal office similar to that represented by the stylus-wielding caprids with long curved horns in Figure 5 (see also Kelley Reference Kelley, Cartolano and Ferrara2024: fig. 3.3E/3.5). Around forty texts use this sign, almost all in the header position. These texts have very different shapes, sizes, and contents and bear different seal impressions (many are not sealed or the seal is faint) (Table 4).

Unlike the archival groups mentioned earlier, it is difficult to immediately see a relationship between these documents. We can conclude that whatever the institutional setting implied by M327+M342, it was interested in tracking sheep, in grain storehouse management, in agricultural field planning, and in other products, and it was also involved in surveying a range of social or economic units and their personnel (List A).

7.5 Oddities

A myriad of oddities in scribal practice wait to be documented, explored, and explained. The tablet on the right of Figure 30 appears to be deliberately pierced through, a phenomenon found on a few other tablets, including those from Tepe Sialk.Footnote ⁸² Is this a label strung and attached to something (Paladre Reference Paladre2022: 170)? Such a practice is occasionally found in early proto-cuneiform and also in the first inscriptions from Egypt. If this is a proto-Elamite ‘tag’, then the scribe was being rather clever, making the hole with the numerical stylus in exactly the spot where the proto-Elamite sign M4 needs a circular impression. Another wonderful oddity is the scribal doodle (surely a signature) on the reverse of a tablet which incorporates a ‘double-cross’ that features as a sign in the writing system.Footnote ⁸³ These examples illustrate proto-Elamite as a technology with a sometimes playful, innovative spirit.

Figure 30

Left: MDP 26, 50/P008738 as a unique ‘doodle’ on its reverse. Tablet images courtesy of CDLI/National Museum of Iran. Right: MDP 17, 44/P008242 is ‘pierced’ through just where the sign M4 normally has a circular impression.

Author’s drawing/Seal art after Amiet (1972) no. 44.

8.1 Theories about the Script’s Abandonment

We will never know precisely what caused the system to be abandoned, but we can point to some dynamics that may have been at play. For one, proto-Elamite writing was in the hands of small groups of people, and even if those groups had some presence at distant sites, their numbers may have been modest enough that a loss of power among them or the untimely deaths of a generation of scribes could have spelt the end of the technology (Dahl Reference Dahl2025). Interactions with increasingly urban Early Dynastic polities in Mesopotamia must have influenced the social and political situation of early third millennium Susa, but just how remains unknown (Matthews & Fazeli Nashli Reference Matthews and Fazeli Nashli2022: 234).

Paleoclimate studies also fill in part of the picture of the conditions during which the writing system was both invented and then abandoned. The transition from the Mid to Late Holocene was a period of climate instability, with overall colder and drier conditions lasting approximately from 3200 to 2700 BCE. This kicked off with a ‘5.2 K event’ (about 3200 BCE), which may have brought significant drought that coincided with the collapse of the Late Uruk network and the approximate onset of proto-Elamite writing. The following centuries may have continued to experience unpredictability in rainfall, with extreme storms and the flooding of rivers, which have been linked to settlement instability in north-central Iran (Islam et al. Reference Islam, Amirkhiz and Amini2023). It is possible that the invention of proto-Elamite was, in part, a technological response to increased pressures on food stability.

Dahl (Reference Dahl2019) has questioned whether there is sufficient evidence to link the disappearance of proto-Elamite with civilisational collapse, instead suggesting that proto-Elamite writing may have ‘suffered from internal problems’. In particular, proto-Elamite writing does not have evidence of a developed ‘lexical’ or list-copying tradition like the one found in up to one-fifth of the proto-cuneiform corpus, which was used to standardise and transmit the writing system. For whatever reasons, proto-Elamite did not become embedded in durable social institutions. Moreover, several scholars have offered variations on the idea that there could have been a rejection of the writing system by those who felt its control over local resources to be oppressive or unsuited to their lifeways (Lamberg-Karlovsky Reference Lamberg-Karlovsky2009: 73; Saeedi Reference Saeedi and Abar2021; Daneshmand Reference Daneshmand2024). Did the attempts to standardise people’s labour and resource use prove too rigid and undesirable, or less resilient than other strategies?

8.2 Later Writing in Iran

In the twenty-third century BCE, the Old Akkadian powerhouse from central Iraq extended its influence to Susa, from which point onwards cuneiform was used in Susa to write documents in Akkadian, Sumerian, and eventually Elamite. As many as eight centuries may separate proto-Elamite from the next invention of writing in Iran; the Linear Elamite writing system conventionally dated to the reign of Puzur-Inshushinak (c. 2100 BCE). A few dozen Linear Elamite inscriptions are found at Susa, on stone sculptures, clay cones, and a few tablets. Metal vessels from private collections also bear Linear Elamite, as does a vessel rim from Shahdad in Iran’s eastern Kerman province and recently excavated tablets from nearby Konar Sandal South in the Halil Rud valley, not far from Tepe Yahya (Desset et al. Reference Desset, Tabibzadeh, Kervran, Basello and Marchesi2022: table 1).

Although the script’s characters share some affinity with proto-Elamite sign shapes, adopting a similar ‘geometric’ aesthetic, Linear Elamite inscriptions are nothing like proto-Elamite accounts in form or content. Nonetheless, Desset et al. (Reference Desset, Tabibzadeh, Kervran, Basello and Marchesi2022) argue for re-adopting an earlier idea that Linear Elamite is a later development of proto-Elamite through now-lost intermediary writings. These authors suggest, furthermore, that Linear Elamite sound values can open the way to the decipherment of proto-Elamite. However, Dahl (Reference Dahl2023) has argued that similarities in sign shapes in the two systems are very unlikely to imply an unbroken transmission of writing. Instead, he argues, ancient Susians may have found already ancient tablets when conducting construction work, which could have offered them a mysterious local symbol set on which to model their new script. The excavation of tablets is well attested in cuneiform antiquity, and ancient imitations of much more ancient documents have been found. There is some evidence, as well, that the inventors of Linear Elamite modelled some of their syllabic signs in reference to Akkadian cuneiform (Dahl Reference Dahl2025: 303).

8.3 Next Steps in Proto-Elamite Studies

This decipherment project is far from finished. New discoveries are being and will be made through excavations as well as through better documentation and study of objects already in museum collections. Some discoveries may fundamentally change our understanding of proto-Elamite period communities in Iran. Scholars are likely to make the most progress by continuing to develop interdisciplinary lines of investigation, while a richer, more holistic understanding of proto-Elamite writing and society can be built on our increased ability to manipulate the text corpus in digital platforms and to integrate textual evidence with materials from the archaeological record. Many aspects of this sign system may remain undecipherable, but our understanding of the history of writing, and of the proto-Elamite phenomenon linking communities across Iran, has been and will continue to be transformed by new methods for studying the script, the tablets, and related material culture.