Beyond Mesopotamia

Decipherments​ of ancient scripts are often attributed, and sometimes misattributed, to individual scholars: Jean-Jacques Barthélemy and the Phoenician alphabet, Champollion and Egyptian hieroglyphs, Magnus Celsius and Staveless Runes, Michael Ventris and Linear B, Edward Hincks and Akkadian cuneiform, Yuri Knorozov and Maya glyphs. These were undeniable intellectual achievements. They were also endeavours tinged with madness. How else could anyone persist with such fiendishly difficult work? The 11th-century Arabic text on decipherment, The Book of Mad Desire for the Knowledge of Written Symbols, grasped something of this fact. Decipherment has attracted more than its fair share of formidable scholars, enthusiastic amateurs and crackpots, all seeking connection with a lost past, or the power to make obscure symbols speak. Who wouldn’t want to be woken in the middle of the night, as Simon Kimmins was by his flatmate Ventris, and asked whether they would like to be ‘the second person in four thousand years to read this script’?

In July 2022, the French scholar François Desset and a team of co-authors published what they claimed was proof of a decipherment of Linear Elamite, a writing system used on the Iranian plateau around four thousand years ago. The paper appeared in the Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie, one of the leading Assyriology journals. Linear Elamite had eluded understanding ever since its discovery by archaeologists at the site of Susa in south-west Iran in 1903. It can’t match the significance of cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphs, but it is one of the oldest known forms of writing in the world. Decades of sporadic efforts at decipherment had yielded little progress. Scholars had tried and some had contributed important work (Desset’s paper was dedicated to the ‘great pioneers who paved the way’). But before 2018, phonemic values had been proposed for just twelve signs.

Elam, like Sumeria, is an exochoronym, never used in the region itself. As the first documented polity in what we now call Iran, it remains a lesser-known contemporary of the great Mesopotamian states. Elam is recorded dozens of times in the Bible, where it features as a bellicose but impressive kingdom to the east. Susa is mentioned by Herodotus and Strabo, and by Milton in Book Three of Paradise Regained. It would take the decipherment of cuneiform, however, for any Elamite history to come to light. Sumerian scribes referred to the land immediately to their east using the logogrammatic sign NIM. In Akkadian cuneiform, it was referred to as Elamtu. After King Ashurbanipal’s library in Nineveh was discovered in 1853, there was no longer any doubt. The Babylonian records were full of wars with the Elamites.

Kunanki vessel (c.1980 bce) from the Mahboubian collection.

Linear Elamite writing was used at least from the reign of King Puzur-Shushinak, shortly after the collapse of the Akkadian empire around 2150 bce, until the reign of Pala-ishan around 1880 bce. It appears carved into monuments, engraved on metal objects and, like cuneiform and the Proto-Elamite writing that appeared before it, inscribed on clay. Around half of all existing texts were discovered by French archaeologists after the creation in 1897 of the Délégation scientifique française en Perse. The geologist and colonial tin miner Jacques de Morgan led a fifteen-year excavation at Susa involving a thousand workers in search of the origins of civilisation. The Susa acropolis, de Morgan thought, ‘alone contains remains from all ages’. His work was continued by men with similar hopes, including Roland de Mecquenem and Father Vincent Scheil, who wanted to find the ‘famous rival of Babylon and Nineveh’ which was ‘still sleeping underground and had not yet spoken’. By the standards of modern archaeology they made a terrible mess. But they filled the Louvre with remarkable artefacts: the life-size headless statue of Queen Napir-Asu, the bronze Sit Shamsi model, depicting crouched figures in an enigmatic religious act, brilliant gold statuettes of worshippers and some of the oldest examples of writing in the world.

The Mayanist Michael Coe used to say that three things are necessary to decipher ancient writing. You need lots of examples of the script. You need a good understanding of the cultural context of the writing system. And, most important, you need a bilingual, or better a trilingual, inscription of a known writing system – a Rosetta stone, Ganjnameh or Behistun inscription carved on the orders of a helpful long dead monarch. On first pass, Linear Elamite was lacking all of these conditions. The known corpus is made up of around forty inscriptions (compared with hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets). Knowledge of the history and culture of Elam, and of the Elamite language, is patchy at best. There are a small number of objects inscribed with both Linear Elamite and Akkadian cuneiform, but maddeningly the texts are not translations of one another. It is easy to see why François Desset, who began his attempts at deciphering Linear Elamite inscriptions in 2006, made no progress at all for eleven years.

I met Desset last year in his apartment in Angers, which is decorated with miniatures depicting scenes from the Shahnameh. He told me that he had never expected to decipher an ancient script, and that his discoveries had been a matter of chance as much as anything. Desset did his PhD in archaeology at the Sorbonne under Serge Cleuziou, one of the founding fathers of Arabian archaeology, and studied Akkadian under Dominique Charpin, now the chair of Mesopotamian studies at the Collège de France. At first, like most students of the ancient near east, he wanted to work on Mesopotamia. The 2003 invasion of Iraq put paid to that. At Cleuziou’s suggestion he turned instead to Iran and contacted Jean Perrot, the last head of the French excavations at Susa before the Iranian revolution. By then in his eighties, Perrot immediately arranged a place for him at a new excavation in Jiroft in eastern Iran. The 2006 season would be the beginning of more than a decade of work on Elam and ancient Iran. When not away on digs, or teaching in Tehran, he was trying – and failing – to decipher Linear Elamite.

It was in Tehran in the spring of 2017 that Desset finally made a breakthrough. But the key to the decipherment came not from Tehran, or even the Louvre. It came from a set of mysterious silver vessels in a private collection in London. In 2004, the Mahboubian family, descendants of an early Iranian excavator and inheritors of a sizeable collection of ancient art of dubious provenance, had published three photographs of silver beakers, known as kunanki, displaying Linear Elamite inscriptions. Like everyone else interested in the subject, Desset assumed that the objects were probably modern forgeries. Unlike other scholars, however, he wanted to see them for himself. In 2011 he gave a presentation in Cambridge on the lack of development in the decipherment of Linear Elamite. Afterwards, the keeper of the Middle East department at the British Museum, John Curtis, mentioned that he knew the Mahboubian family and could make an introduction. It took four years of cajoling but eventually the family agreed to withdraw the silver vessels from a safe deposit box for Desset to examine.

Desset is adamant that without the silver kunanki the decipherment would have been impossible. Photographs published by the Mahboubians in 2004 displayed only one side of each object, but the inscriptions wrap around the vessels. Seeing them in person, Desset had access to more Linear Elamite inscriptions than any previous scholar. Even then he wasn’t sure if the longer inscriptions would help, or whether the silver vessels were genuine. He took new photographs and returned to Iran. ‘In 2017, in my flat in Tehran, I was playing with the inscriptions and I noticed a specific sequence of four signs,’ he told me. ‘In each case the third and fourth signs were the same.’ The first sign in the sequence was believed by earlier scholars to be the sign for the syllable ‘Shi’. Desset hypothesised that if the repeating third and fourth sign were the syllable ‘Ha’, the sequence might be the name of the Elamite ruler Shilhaha. Within minutes, by fitting the signs for ‘Ha’ and the consonant L into other inscriptions, he was able to see the familiar names of gods and kings jumping out of the text. Napirisha. Eparti. Theonyms and royal anthroponyms are often the first steps in decipherment, as they were here. ‘I had been working on this for eleven years, and it was a very exciting moment,’ Desset said. ‘I think once you live that kind of moment, everything else can only be boring and tasteless.’

He likes to say that decipherment proceeds from the known to the unknown. But the task is arduous even when – as with the Rosetta Stone – you have a text in an undeciphered script next to the same text in a known one. For Desset, who had no biscript, the best course was to look for similar objects from the same period, inscribed in known writing systems, that might feature the names of the same rulers. By comparing the text on the kunanki vessels with similar objects bearing cuneiform inscriptions, it was possible to piece together phonemic values for more signs. In this effort Desset was joined by two amateurs: Kambiz Tabibzadeh, who lacked specialist training but who had visited Susa as a child, and Matthieu Kervran. In 2020, the Elamite-language cuneiform specialist Gian Pietro Basello joined them, enticed by access to new texts. To help prepare their findings, they brought in Gianni Marchesi, an Italian scholar of Akkadian and Sumerian at the University of Bologna. The 2022 publication in Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie led to talks in Cambridge and, last October, at the British Museum. Desset and his colleagues are now preparing a three-volume book of all known Linear Elamite inscriptions accompanied by cuneiform inscriptions in the Elamite language that were used in the decipherment, which they hope to publish this year.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the decipherment is that, if Desset is correct, Linear Elamite is a phonographic writing system, consisting entirely of signs representing phonemes. Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs started out as logogrammatic writing systems, in which the signs record words rather than sounds. Over time they acquired syllabic signs, but they retained logograms and determinatives, which help indicate the semantic class (gods, buildings, professions) to which polyvalent signs belong. Desset’s proposed interpretation of Linear Elamite signs includes five vowels, twelve consonants, sixty consonant-vowel (CV) syllables, and no logograms. He and his co-authors claim to have identified 72 of the 77 hypothesised signs of the writing system, which account for 96 per cent of the sign occurrences in the Linear Elamite corpus. Four signs, which may correspond to the gaps in Desset’s phonetic grid, remain to be deciphered, as do thirty or so hapax legomena (isolated instances), which he believes may be chronological or geographical variants. Remarkably, one Linear Elamite object, known as text M, appears to record a fragmentary copy of the phonetic grid, with vowels on one axis, consonants at the other, and CV syllables cross-referenced for scribes in training.

The word ‘decipherment’ is in a sense a misnomer. Ancient scripts are not ciphers. They were not designed to be unintelligible to outsiders or intentionally deceive. Ancient inscriptions were written by people following rules that may appear complex, but are no more so than the conventions of our own writing system. The decipherer looks for clues: famous kings, place names, common titles. But these patterns are never enough on their own. At some point he must conjecture the meaning of a sign. However much one grounds the conjecture in clues or contextual understanding, it is unsupportable until it is proved. There is an inevitable imaginative leap.

The vast majority of Linear Elamite signs can now be read, but understanding the text is a different matter. Elamite, like Sumerian, is a language isolate and, unlike Ancient Egyptian, it has no surviving descendant. The two main reference materials for the Elamite language are Friedrich Wilhelm König’s Die elamischen Königsinschriften (1965) and Walther Hinz and Heidemarie Koch’s Elamisches Wörterbuch (1987), which is based on Achaemenid inscriptions written in the Elamite language more than a thousand years after the Linear Elamite texts. To make matters worse, the Achaemenid inscriptions were written in cuneiform, which only records four vowels, equivalent to A, E, I and U, whereas the decipherment of Linear Elamite writing suggests that the Elamite language also included an O vowel. As a result, knowledge of the Elamite language remains imperfect. The inscriptions found in the east of Iran in particular are very difficult to understand. Linear Elamite is not, like Etruscan, a chantier linguistique, which can be pronounced yet not read, but there’s a lot about Elamite syntax, grammar and phonology that remains unknown.

That being said, Desset is able to read and translate a surprising amount of Linear Elamite writing. In his apartment in Angers, he read and translated for me a series of Linear Elamite texts. The most striking were those inscribed on the silver kunanki: ‘O, great lord Napirisha, I Pala-ishan, servant of Napirisha, great governor, menni [perhaps ‘crowned one’] of Hatamti, made this in silver and gave it to you Napirisha as a sign of kere. Made stronger, you lead night and day … May I obtain from you, for my kere, a continuous zemi.’ Desset originally believed that the kunanki were funerary beakers forged for the deaths of kings. But translating the inscriptions suggested that the vessels had a different purpose. The texts share a formula: they all begin with an address to the god Napirisha and list the titles borne by kings of the Shimashki and Sukkalmah Elamite dynasties. They then document an exchange between the king, who offers kere and in return asks for zemi. ‘These are very probably royal prayers that were pronounced by kings in front of the statue of the god in the temple of Napirisha,’ Desset told me. ‘The ruler offers kere, which is likely worship or devotion, in return for zemi, fortune or prosperity.’

Devotion for divine favour. Our minds can conjure the scene with ease. Brilliant, inscribed silverware is placed at the foot of the god by a new king. ‘They were very probably deposited in the temple of Napirisha in Anshan as a perpetual prayer,’ Desset said. It is impossible to prove, particularly since the archaeological context of the objects is completely unknown. But the imagery on one of the kunanki supports the thesis. Below the inscription kneels a royal figure, his hands supinated in prayer. In sealings and carved reliefs from the period, the same figure is depicted in front of an image of the local god on his serpent throne. The placing of the kunanki at the foot of a divine statue would complete the scene. One way to confirm the theory would be to excavate at Tell Malyan, the likely site of the city of Anshan, and find the temple of Napirisha. But even were it discovered, no silver kunanki would remain.

Kunanki vessel (c.1980 bce) from the Mahboubian collection.

Where​ did these mesmerising objects come from, and how did they end up in a safe deposit box in London? The polite answer given by archaeologists about such objects is that they come from ‘irregular excavations’. The impolite answer is that they were looted. When Desset asked the Mahboubian family they said only that the kunanki vessels were found by their grandfather, Benjamin Mahboubian, who led ‘commercial excavations’ in the 1920s and 1930s, and that they believed the objects were found at a site near Kamfiruz. ‘At that time, the Iranian government published a list of prohibited sites, but outside of those sites you could excavate if you paid for a concession,’ Desset told me. This is deeply frustrating, because knowing where, in what context and in which stratigraphic layer an artefact was found can be critical to understanding its history. The illicit trade in antiquities permanently damages our picture of the past. How can one be sure artefacts without provenance aren’t forgeries? Only the revelation the kunanki provided convinced Desset that they were genuine.

The kunanki are fascinating objects, but their role in the decipherment of Linear Elamite is contentious. What does it mean that the key to the puzzle was found not by painstakingly copying stone carvings halfway up a wooden ladder, but inside a British bank? Desset has been criticised for even engaging with them in the first place. The community of Elam scholars is tiny and idiosyncratic. Some within it argue that there are serious ethical questions involved in studying objects from non-standard excavations. What if doing so encourages the looting of more artefacts? Desset is exasperated with the idea that he should not have made use of the Mahboubian collection. ‘If I had not fought to see the kunanki we would still not have deciphered Linear Elamite writing … I shouldn’t, but I react very badly to that idea.’ He believes the damage done by past excavators – of which European archaeologists on permitted digs were far from innocent – would be compounded by ignoring the historical evidence they unearthed. If there were thousands of Linear Elamite texts discovered in a good stratigraphic context it might be reasonable to ignore the few that weren’t. But the opposite is the case. ‘Of course it is problematic,’ he said, ‘but when the objects appeared, other scholars said they were fake. Now when I show they are genuine and use them to decipher Linear Elamite they start accusing me of fuelling illegal excavations. I don’t believe anyone needs me as an excuse to loot.’

The dream behind decipherment is that it will lead to the discovery of whole histories. When Champollion deciphered the hieroglyphs he knew it meant that ‘we can finally read the ancient monuments and follow the ancient Egyptian dynasties.’ The decipherment of Mesopotamian cuneiform opened up an extraordinary intellectual and literary culture. The Linear Elamite texts do not approach the richness of the cuneiform records. There is nothing like the Nippur murder trial tablet – the 3800-year-old court record of a murder covered up by the victim’s wife. There are no hymns to the goddess of beer. But Linear Elamite need not be judged by that standard. After all, there are nearly 130,000 cuneiform tablets in the British Museum alone and just 43 Linear Elamite inscriptions. Ventris’s decipherment was of considerable historical importance even though the Linear B inscriptions are themselves fairly uninspiring. Nowhere does the equivalent to the phrase ‘night and day’ occur in Linear B. It does in Linear Elamite.

Desset argues that one thing the Linear Elamite texts reveal is that the concept of ‘Elam’ was a Mesopotamian construct, similar to the European notion of ‘the Orient’. The ancient inhabitants of the Iranian plateau may have thought of themselves as belonging to an Elamite-speaking (or, as they would have had it, Hatamtite-speaking) cultural world, but not to a country called Elam. The city of Anshan, he believes, was called Anzan by the people who lived there. The Linear Elamite inscriptions also appear to extend the range of the Elamite-speaking world as far east as Kerman in south-east Iran. In addition, Desset believes he has discovered a new Elamite title, hatpak, meaning governor. At first, Puzur-Shushinak used the title Hatpak of Susa, then ‘Shepk’ of the people of Hatamti, and finally Zemt, or king, of Awan. It was previously thought that Awan was a place in Elam, but based on the Linear Elamite inscriptions Desset believes that ‘Awa’ was the word for mother and Awan may mean something like ‘motherland’.

Aside from the content of the inscriptions, Desset has also advanced three major theories about the significance of geographic Iran to the history of writing, which he believes has been neglected by Mesopotamian scholarship. First, based on the decipherment, he claims that Linear Elamite is the world’s earliest purely phonetic writing system, ousting Proto-Sinaitic and pushing back the advent of phonetic writing by more than five hundred years. Second, he believes that the history of writing itself, which is generally understood to have begun in Uruk around 3300 bce with Proto-Cuneiform, must give greater prominence to Iran. Finally, he argues that, rather than being invented at the end of the third millennium bce, Linear Elamite writing evolved out of the earlier Proto-Elamite writing system and represents a thousand-year tradition of writing beginning at the end of the fourth millennium bce.

Desset’s first theory more or less follows from the decipherment. Unless someone shows that he is mistaken, or finds a logogram or determinative lurking in the hapax legomena, Linear Elamite unquestionably predates other purely phonetic writing systems by hundreds of years. Both cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs developed as mixed logogrammatic and phonetic systems. The conventional story is that phonetic writing emerged as a result of the rebus principle. Scribes mostly using logograms and faced with the problem of recording the names of foreigners resorted to using pictograms to spell out the necessary phonemes (think of an American trying to record the toponym ‘Iran’ with a pictograph of an eye next to one of a person running). But Linear Elamite seems not to have logograms. Desset claims that this makes it ‘more precise and simple’. But I see no way to support that claim without also believing that alphabets like the Latin or Greek writing systems are simpler or ‘more precise’ than mostly logographic writing systems like written Chinese.

The conventional history of writing dates its emergence to Proto-Cuneiform tablets used in the economy of ancient Mesopotamia. Tokens of differing sizes and shapes were used to record quantities of wheat, barley and other agricultural products. In Uruk, the world’s first city, the state bureaucracy developed a system of using clay tablets bearing symbolic and numerical notation. The idea of writing, if not the system itself, was transmitted from Mesopotamia to Egypt and to Elam as Proto-Elamite. Desset, like some Egyptologists, wants to dispute the genetic relationship between Proto-Elamite writing and Proto-Cuneiform by claiming that Proto-Cuneiform and Proto-Elamite are not mother and daughter but sisters.

The idea of Proto-Elamite sharing the title of first writing system is bound to be attractive to a scholar specialising in ancient Elam. It’s true that radiocarbon dating can’t definitively prove that the earliest Proto-Cuneiform tablets found at Uruk are the oldest examples of writing on earth. The Proto-Elamite tablets were mostly found in Susa and are conventionally dated to the end of the fourth millennium. Like Proto-Cuneiform, the Proto-Elamite archive is an agricultural database of the state. Desset claims that it is impossible to prove that either Proto-Cuneiform or Proto-Elamite came first, and proposes that both may have separately developed from earlier numerical tablets. But as the scholar Adam Falkenstein put it in the 1930s, ‘the idea of writing has surely not been invented twice by these two neighbouring countries that live in constant exchange.’ Which came first?

Even though carbon dating can’t currently confirm it, there are good contextual reasons to think that the answer is Proto-Cuneiform. Uruk was the world’s largest urban centre and had five thousand tablets in huge deposits. In the stratigraphic layers preceding the Proto-Elamite corpus at Susa, archaeologists have found Uruk-style craft goods that had replaced local pottery. Some writers have interpreted this as evidence of an Uruk colonisation of Susa. That is probably a misapprehension, but the evidence of cultural influence from Mesopotamia is hard to ignore. Proto-Elamite appears to have borrowed signs from Proto-Cuneiform (such as the sign for female worker, ‘šal’), and some scholars have described the Proto-Elamite numerical system as a subset of the one found in Mesopotamia. There are good reasons to think Proto-Elamite is, as Daniel Potts at NYU has put it, ‘a method of writing which, for all its graphic peculiarities, was founded on … the Proto-Cuneiform system’. When I put these arguments to him, Desset said that the idea of writing may have been thought up in Uruk and spread to the Iranian plateau, or vice versa. But he insisted that the spread would have happened very quickly, perhaps within a single generation, and that the notion that writing was invented in Mesopotamia shouldn’t be treated as an incontrovertible fact.

The boldest thesis advanced by Desset is that Linear Elamite writing descended directly from the undeciphered Proto-Elamite writing that appeared a thousand years earlier. Desset believes that during the third millennium bce, the roughly 300 signs used in Proto-Elamite writing to record anthroponyms, which would have included logograms, were pruned until just the 77 phonetic signs used in Linear Elamite remained. He also thinks he has identified precursors among the Proto-Elamite signs. If he is correct, the history of human writing would look quite different. ‘I think there is a continuity of writing, a proper tradition of writing in Iran from 3300 bce to 1880 bce, which evolved,’ he told me. ‘They sieved the signs and got rid of the logogrammatic notations in order to finally reach this pure and logical phonetic grid.’ This idea is not entirely novel. The archaeologists who discovered the Linear Elamite texts in Susa assumed that the Proto-Elamite and Linear Elamite texts represented a single writing system. The Italian scholar Piero Meriggi also thought the two systems were related. But the idea of descent had long since fallen out of favour. For one thing, the gap between what appear to be the latest Proto-Elamite tablets and the earliest Linear Elamite texts, dated to the time of Puzur-Shushinak, is at least six hundred years.

Desset acknowledges that the chronological gap between the two corpora poses a problem for his theory. He believes that some of the texts of the Proto-Elamite tablets may in fact belong to the first half of the third millennium bce, and that some of the Linear Elamite texts may be older than is now thought. ‘Many of the Linear Elamite clay artefacts have unusual signs and it seems that actually these artefacts might be put in the middle stage between Proto-Elamite and Linear Elamite,’ he told me. Three of the artefacts in question are clay cones – texts J, K, and L – which are difficult to read and include hapax legomena. ‘I really have the impression we are in between Proto and Linear Elamite,’ Desset said, ‘and I think K in particular is the missing link for documenting the middle state.’ A recently published paper provides some small support for Desset’s view. According to work by Mirko Surdi at the University of Ghent, the diaries of the early excavators at Susa are consistent with dating some of the Linear Elamite texts to the pre-Akkadian period, hundreds of years before the reign of Puzur-Shushinak.

Kunanki vessel (c.1980 bce) from the Mahboubian collection.

In the small community of Elamite studies this theory has caused a minor scandal. In February 2023, Jacob Dahl, professor of Assyriology at Oxford, published a stinging critique of Desset’s work. Dahl alleged that Desset’s proposed precursor signs in the Proto-Elamite texts are nothing more than shallow graphical similarities, and sloppily chosen ones at that. Using the same methods, ‘one could compare many signs from Proto-Elamite with signs from the Shang Oracle bones, especially when comparing normalised forms of signs from both systems,’ Dahl wrote. If Linear Elamite developed from Proto-Elamite as part of a continuous tradition of writing, one would expect the signs to converge steadily over time, but there’s no evidence of this. The similarities between some Linear Elamite and Proto-Elamite signs are either incidental or perhaps the result of the creators of Linear Elamite writing basing it on recovered Proto-Elamite tablets they couldn’t read.

When I asked Dahl about Desset’s work on the relationship between Linear Elamite and Proto-Elamite he could scarcely have been more critical. ‘It irritates me that this was even published because it’s so full of errors, errors which would make their predecessors turn in their graves and which are all about forcing the evidence to fit a certain pattern,’ he said. ‘Ordinarily I don’t publish on Linear Elamite, but I thought it was so provocative, in a bad sense, that I had to say something.’ Desset believes that it’s possible Elamite scribes may have made use of perishable materials, like wood and wax, which could explain the gap between Proto and Linear Elamite writing. But Dahl argues that it’s extraordinarily unlikely that a culture could have preserved writing for hundreds of years without leaving behind any evidence. ‘Cultures with writing behave differently from those that don’t,’ Dahl told me. ‘And for hundreds of years we have no seals, no styluses, nothing.’

Desset said that he had been surprised by the tenor of some of the reactions to his paper, but is not discouraged. He thinks much of the criticism is a function of a more general phenomenon: the tendency of Mesopotamian scholarship to look down on Elam. ‘Jacob Dahl is an example of a kind of person I call a Mesopotamiologist. He thinks Mesopotamia is the centre of the world and everything else is just the periphery. But I want to de-Mesopotamianise the history of the Near East.’ For Desset, the wonders of Mesopotamia have diverted attention from the study of Iran, Turkey and the Levant. The decipherment of Linear Elamite, he thinks, adds new data from Iran to the wealth of Near Eastern history. ‘And remember that it was published in the Zeitschrift, the temple of Mesopotamian science,’ he said. ‘Since the decipherment I have discovered new enemies and new allies.’

At some point​ in the early second millennium bce, Linear Elamite writing disappeared. It isn’t clear why. It was replaced in Iran by Elamite, Akkadian and then Old Persian cuneiform. Now that Linear Elamite can be read again, Desset has turned his attention to the task of deciphering Proto-Elamite, and proving his theory about a thousand-year tradition of writing in Iran. Cuneiform was deciphered backwards; its most recent versions were understood first and then used to decode the older forms. If Desset is correct, there would be every reason to think knowledge of Linear Elamite might help in the decipherment of Proto-Elamite writing, the world’s oldest undeciphered script. Or maybe not. Perhaps the two writing systems are unconnected, the relationship between them mysterious. Perhaps, as with Linear A and Linear B, the decipherment of a later writing system won’t help in understanding one that came before.

We tend to think of the decipherer as a solitary individual, working ‘far into the night’, as the classicist Richard Woodard put it, ‘puzzling out some ancient secret’. This image is betrayed by the inevitable presence of other hands. Ventris cracked Linear B by building on Alice Kober’s phonetic grid. Knorozov’s work on Maya glyphs couldn’t be confirmed until Tatiana Proskouriakoff and other Mayanists came along in the 1970s. Desset wouldn’t have found the name Shilhaha without the contributions of earlier scholars, and couldn’t have completed the decipherment without the help of Tabibzadeh, Kervran, Basello and Marchesi. This might all sound very approvingly anti-heroic. But in fact the history of decipherment seems to combine both collaboration and epiphany, or at least a particular quality of mind – what the Assyriologist Irving Finkel recently described as an ‘extra mental twist to your intellectual faculties to enable you to see where people haven’t seen the answer’. When I asked Desset what one required to decipher an ancient script he said all you really need is ‘time, patience and luck’. A refusal to accept pre-conceived notions or limits doesn’t hurt either.

The great decipherments of the past often relied on an element of luck. When seeking to understand the Maya glyphs, Knorozov worked from the beautiful Dresden codex, one of the oldest surviving examples of Maya writing. Had the codex not survived the bombing of Dresden, he would have had little to go on. Had the Linear Elamite kunanki remained locked in a safe deposit box in London, perhaps the script would never have been deciphered. What if the Rosetta Stone had been lost in the Napoleonic wars? We don’t need to stretch our imaginations too far to realise what might not have been. The existence of undeciphered scripts – the Indus writing system, Proto-Elamite, Linear A, the Byblos syllabary, the Olmec glyphs – attests to how much can slip away. Those long dead monarchs weren’t always so helpful as to provide trilingual objects for us to study. They didn’t think it would be necessary.