On the decipherment of Linear Elamite, and what it means to give a civilisation back its words
A Century of Silence
In 1903, French archaeologists excavating the ancient city of Susa in southwestern Iran unearthed something extraordinary — inscriptions in an unknown script, carved into stone and silver, unlike anything they had seen before.
They called it Linear Elamite.
And then, for 120 years, they could not read it.
Not for lack of trying. Generations of the world’s finest linguists and epigraphers turned their attention to those 77 geometric signs. They catalogued them, compared them, theorised about them. And failed, repeatedly, to crack the code.
Linear Elamite remained one of the last great mysteries of the ancient Near East — a writing system that had recorded the words, the laws, the prayers and the royal proclamations of a civilisation that flourished for three thousand years, and that no living human being could understand.
Until now.
The Champollion of Elam
François Desset is a French archaeologist at the University of Liège. He first encountered Linear Elamite in 2006, during excavations in southern Iran, and became quietly obsessed.
For years he studied the known inscriptions, making incremental progress but never achieving the breakthrough he needed. Then, recently, he gained access to ten previously unavailable texts — inscriptions on ancient silver vases from the Mahboubian Collection in London that had never been fully studied.
In those ten new texts, he found his key.
“The key to deciphering a script, as is so often the case, lies in proper names : names of places, gods, kings,” Desset explained.
He identified the name of the Elamite ruler Shilhaha, who reigned around 1950 BCE. A repeated sequence of symbols matched the repeated ending of the ruler’s name — and suddenly, phonetic values could be assigned to signs that had been silent for four millennia.
The comparison with Jean-François Champollion — who cracked Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822 using the royal names Ptolemy and Cleopatra on the Rosetta Stone — is not an exaggeration. Desset has done for Elam what Champollion did for Egypt : he has given a civilisation back its voice.
Who Were the Elamites?
This is perhaps the most important question — because the Elamites are among the most underappreciated civilisations in human history.
Emerging in the fourth millennium BCE in what is now southwestern Iran and southern Iraq, Elam was one of the earliest urban civilisations on earth, contemporary with Sumer and ancient Egypt. Its capital, Susa, was one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. The Elamites developed their own writing system, their own art, their own religious traditions — and for centuries, they were a power to be reckoned with in the ancient Near East.
They fought the Assyrians. They traded with the Indus Valley. They influenced the Persians who came after them — and their language continued to be used in official administration during the Achaemenid Empire of Darius and Xerxes.
And yet they remain largely unknown to the general public. Overshadowed by Babylon, by Egypt, by Greece and Rome, the Elamites have waited patiently in the margins of history — their words unread, their stories untold.
Until Desset unlocked the door.
The Living Stakes
There is a dimension to this story that goes beyond pure scholarship.
Desset himself acknowledged it. “I hope that this work will have a positive impact on Iranian culture and identity once things have returned to normal,” he said — a quiet but pointed reference to the political tensions that have isolated Iran from much of the international archaeological community in recent years.
Iran is home to some of the most extraordinary archaeological heritage on earth. Persepolis. Susa. Pasargadae. Chogha Zanbil — the great Elamite ziggurat that is one of the best-preserved ancient monuments in the world. These sites, and the civilisations they represent, belong not to any government or political system but to all of humanity.
The decipherment of Linear Elamite is a reminder that archaeology is, at its best, an act of cultural diplomacy — a way of building bridges across time, across languages, across political divides, by insisting that the human story is shared.
The Scripts That Still Wait
Desset’s achievement also reminds us of how much remains to be done.
Linear Elamite is not the only ancient writing system that has resisted decipherment. The Minoan Linear A — the script of the civilisation that inspired Anthereos’s Minoan collection — remains undeciphered. Proto-Elamite, even older than Linear Elamite, is still largely unread. The Indus Valley script, used by one of the ancient world’s most sophisticated urban civilisations, has defeated every attempt at decipherment for over a century.
Each of these scripts is a closed door behind which an entire civilisation waits in silence.
Artificial intelligence is now being brought to bear on some of these problems — algorithms trained on thousands of ancient texts, searching for patterns that human eyes have missed. The combination of human intuition and machine learning may yet open doors that have been shut for millennia.
The voices of the past are not gone. They are waiting.
What This Means for Us
Every decipherment is, at its core, an act of rescue.
When Champollion read hieroglyphs for the first time in 1822, he did not simply solve a puzzle. He restored a civilisation to the human conversation — gave back to Egypt its history, its literature, its prayers, its jokes, its love songs. He made the ancient Egyptians our contemporaries.
Desset has done the same for the Elamites.
And this is why archaeology matters — not as an academic exercise, not as a hobby for enthusiasts, but as one of the most profound things human beings can do for each other across time. To say to the dead : we hear you. We have not forgotten. Your words still matter.
In a world that moves faster every year, that discards the past as irrelevant, that measures value in clicks and seconds, the patient, obsessive work of a French archaeologist hunched over silver vases in a London collection is a quiet act of resistance.
The past has things to say. We just need to learn to listen.
And sometimes, after 120 years of silence, it finally speaks.
Stephen Rimorini — The Living Past