What is this stuff?: scholars may break challenge of 'proto-Elamite' writing

[biro]

If you think Internet chat rooms can get garbled, try to decipher the writings of the proto-Elamites. Oxford University researchers say they are on the verge of figuring out the symbols on clay tablets, which came from what's now Iran.

From the article:

In a room high up in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, above the Egyptian mummies and fragments of early civilisations, a big black dome is clicking away and flashing out light.

This device, part sci-fi, part-DIY, is providing the most detailed and high quality images ever taken of these elusive symbols cut into clay tablets. This is Indiana Jones with software.

[dcommini]

I wonder if they have ever found anything later than Proto-Elamite that might help with this translation. It sounds odd to me that a writing system would just disappear with out any trace of borrowings or evolutions into new writing systems (excepting the case where a civilization was obliterated due to some catastrophe). Of course I am no expert so what do I know?

[ialmisry]

I wonder if they have ever found anything later than Proto-Elamite that might help with this translation. It sounds odd to me that a writing system would just disappear with out any trace of borrowings or evolutions into new writing systems (excepting the case where a civilization was obliterated due to some catastrophe).

happens all the time.

For all the borrowings and evolution of the Etruscan alphabet into Latin, we have little knowledge of it.  And that is in the middle of the Ancient World.

[dcommini]

I wonder if they have ever found anything later than Proto-Elamite that might help with this translation. It sounds odd to me that a writing system would just disappear with out any trace of borrowings or evolutions into new writing systems (excepting the case where a civilization was obliterated due to some catastrophe).

happens all the time.

For all the borrowings and evolution of the Etruscan alphabet into Latin, we have little knowledge of it.  And that is in the middle of the Ancient World.

I thought there was some knowledge of Etruscan, or I thought I remembered reading something like that a few years back...

[NicholasMyra]

Hopefully this will help prove or disprove the link between Elamite and Harappan (Indus Valley Civilization) symbology, and help further discredit the vestiges of Aryan race theory that remain in such fields.

[vamrat]

I was going to guess that it was related to Cuneiform and it looks like the later Elamite language did in fact adapt the Akkadian cuneiform.   Wikipedia says that Proto-Elamite and Linear Elamite are not related to Cuneiform, a script that has largely been deciphered. 

[sheenj]

Hopefully this will help prove or disprove the link between Elamite and Harappan (Indus Valley Civilization) symbology, and help further discredit the vestiges of Aryan race theory that remain in such fields.

What's the Aryan race theory?

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