Breaking the Code: The Decipherment of Late 3rd–Early 2nd Millennium BCE Iranian Linear Elamite Writing

First discovered in Susa in 1903, Linear Elamite writing is one of the world’s oldest writing systems, alongside Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. This talk aims to present the steps that led to its decipherment between 2017 and 2020 while highlighting its very original phonetic structure. Examples of newly deciphered texts will also be provided, along with discussions on newly emerging linguistic questions.

by François Desset

François Desset is a European archaeologist and philologist specializing in Ancient Near Eastern history. He has worked extensively in Iran and spent several years excavating the 3rd millennium BCE Jiroft civilization while living and teaching in Tehran from 2014 to 2020. Between 2017 and 2020, he led the decipherment of Linear Elamite writing, an ancient script used in southern Iran between the late 3rd and early 2nd millennium BCE. He is currently a research fellow at Liège University (Belgium), where, in collaboration with Laurent Colonna d’Istria and Stéphane Polis, he is developing a database of Linear Elamite writing while also working on the decipherment of its earlier stage—the late 4th millennium BCE Proto-Elamite tablets.

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