How it began
Proto-Elamite is the name given to a writing system used in the Susiana plain and the Iranian highlands between about 3050 and 2900 BCE. Its tablets are the earliest complex written documents from the region. At Susa, in what is now southwestern Iran, they come from levels 16 to 14B of the Acropole mound. Earlier tablets from Godin Tepe and Chogha Mish carry only numbers and are not counted as Proto-Elamite.
Before it existed
The Proto-Elamite texts share the general structure of the proto-cuneiform tablets of Mesopotamia, and their more developed linear layout implies that proto-cuneiform is the older of the two. Encyclopaedia Iranica notes that the ideographic signs are sometimes assumed to record an early form of the Elamite language, but this is not established.
How it works
The texts were written in a linear script on thick oblong clay tablets, using both faces, with totals recorded along the upper edge of the reverse. Each entry normally consists of an ideogram followed by a number. The scribes used several counting systems, including sexagesimal, decimal and a system for grain capacity, largely borrowed from Mesopotamia. The ideograms denote persons, the objects being counted and institutions.
What changed first
The tablets are administrative documents without exception. They record receipts and transfers of grain, livestock and laborers, and the issue of rations. No literary or school texts are known. Excavations have shown that the script was used at administrative centers across Iran as far as the Afghan border, including Sialk, Malyan, Tepe Yahya and Shahr-i Sokhta.
Where it stands today
About 1,450 Proto-Elamite tablets from Susa have been published since the first were found at the turn of the 20th century and published by Scheil in 1900. The script has been only partially deciphered. Progress has come mainly from understanding the numerical systems, and work has been held back by the lack of a dependable sign list. New Scientist has described it as a third early script, overlooked beside cuneiform and hieroglyphs.
