Elamite cuneiform was a logo-syllabic script used to write the

Elamite language Elamite, also known as Hatamtite and formerly as Susian, is an extinct language that was spoken by the ancient Elamites. It was used in what is now southwestern Iran from 2600 BC to 330 BC. Elamite works disappear from the archeological record ...

. The complete corpus of Elamite cuneiform consists of over 30,000 tablets and fragments. The majority belong to the

Achaemenid The Achaemenid Empire or Achaemenian Empire (; peo, wikt:𐎧𐏁𐏂𐎶, 𐎧𐏁𐏂, , ), also called the First Persian Empire, was an History of Iran#Classical antiquity, ancient Iranian empire founded by Cyrus the Great in 550 BC. Bas ...

era, and contain primarily economic records. At Persepolis in 1933–34, 33,000 Elamite cuneiform tablets were found.Vollmers, Gloria L. “ACCOUNTING AND CONTROL IN THE PERSEPOLIS FORTIFICATION TABLETS.” The Accounting Historians Journal, vol. 36, no. 2, 2009, pp. 93–111

History and decipherment

The

(c. 3000 BCE to 400 BCE) is the now-extinct language spoken by Elamites, who inhabited the regions of Khūzistān and Fārs in Southern

Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkmeni ...

. It has long been an enigma for scholars due to the scarcity of resources for its research and the irregularities found in the language. It seems to have no relation to its neighboring Semitic and

Indo-European languages The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, D ...

.Starostin, George (2002) Scholars fiercely argue over several hypotheses about its origin, but have no definite theory. Elamite cuneiform comes in two variants, the first, derived from

Akkadian Akkadian or Accadian may refer to: * Akkadians, inhabitants of the Akkadian Empire * Akkadian language, an extinct Eastern Semitic language * Akkadian literature, literature in this language * Akkadian cuneiform Cuneiform is a logo-syllabic ...

, was used during the 3rd to 2nd millennia BCE, and a simplified form used during the 1st millennium BCE.Khačikjan (1998) The main difference between the two variants is the reduction of glyphs used in the simplified version. At any one time, there would only be around 130 cuneiform signs in use. Throughout the script's history, only 206 different signs were used in total.

First document in Elamite cuneiform (2250 BCE)

The earliest text using Elamite cuneiform, an adaptation of

Akkadian cuneiform Cuneiform is a logo- syllabic script that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Middle East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. It is named for the characteristic wedge-s ...

, is a treaty between the Akkadian Naram-Sin and the Elamite Khita that dates back to 2250 BCE. The Treaty enumerates the kings of Elam, as guarantors of the agreement, and states: However, some believe that Elamite cuneiform might have been in use since 2500 BCE.Peter Daniels and William Bright (1996) The tablets are poorly preserved, so only limited parts can be read, but it is understood that the text is a treaty between the Akkad king Nāramsîn and Elamite ruler Hita, as indicated by frequent references like "Nāramsîn's friend is my friend, Nāramsîn's enemy is my enemy". The most famous Elamite scriptures and the ones that ultimately led to its decipherment are the ones found in the trilingual inscriptions of monuments commissioned by the

Persian kings.Reiner, Erica (2005) The inscriptions, similar to that of the

Rosetta Stone The Rosetta Stone is a stele composed of granodiorite inscribed with three versions of a decree issued in Memphis, Egypt, in 196 BC during the Ptolemaic dynasty on behalf of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes. The top and middle texts are in Anci ...

's, were written in three different writing systems. The first was

Old Persian Old Persian is one of the two directly attested Old Iranian languages (the other being Avestan) and is the ancestor of Middle Persian (the language of Sasanian Empire). Like other Old Iranian languages, it was known to its native speakers as ( ...

, which was deciphered in 1802 by

Georg Friedrich Grotefend Georg Friedrich Grotefend (9 June 1775 – 15 December 1853) was a German epigraphist and philologist. He is known mostly for his contributions toward the decipherment of cuneiform. Georg Friedrich Grotefend had a son, named Carl Ludwig Gro ...

. The second, Babylonian cuneiform, was deciphered shortly after the Old Persian text. Because Elamite is unlike its neighboring

Semitic languages The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, the Horn of Africa, and latterly North Africa, Malta, West Africa, Chad, and in large immigrant ...

, the script's decipherment was delayed until the 1840s. Even today, lack of sources and comparative materials hinder further research of Elamite.

Inventory

Elamite radically reduced the number of cuneiform glyphs. From the entire history of the script, only 206 glyphs are used; at any one time, the number was fairly constant at about 130. In the earliest tablets the script is almost entirely syllabic, with almost all common Old Akkadian syllabic glyphs with C V and VC values being adopted. Over time the number of syllabic glyphs is reduced while the number of logograms increases. About 40 CVC glyphs are also occasionally used, but they appear to have been used for the consonants and ignored the vocalic value. Several

determinative A determinative, also known as a taxogram or semagram, is an ideogram used to mark semantic categories of words in logographic scripts which helps to disambiguate interpretation. They have no direct counterpart in spoken language, though they may ...

s are also used. Glyphs in parentheses in the table are not common. The script distinguished the four vowels of Akkadian and 15 consonants, /p/, /b/, /k/, /g/, /t/, /d/, /š/, /s/, /z/, /y/, /l/, /m/, /n/, /r/, and /h/. The Akkadian voiced pairs /p, b/, /k, g/, and /t, d/ may not have been distinct in Elamite. The series transcribed ''z'' may have been an

affricate An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation (most often coronal). It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pai ...

such as /č/ or /c/ (ts). /hV/ was not always distinguished from simple vowels, suggesting that /h/ may have been dropping out of the language. The VC glyphs are often used for a

syllable coda A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological " ...

without any regard to the value of V, suggesting that they were in fact alphabetic C signs. Much of the conflation of Ce and Ci, and also eC and iC, is inherited from Akkadian ''(pe-pi-bi, ke-ki, ge-gi, se-si, ze-zi, le-li, re-ri,'' and ''ḫe-ḫi''—that is, only ''ne-ni'' are distinguished in Akkadian but not Elamite; of the VC syllables, only ''eš-iš-uš).'' In addition, is ''aḫ, eḫ, iḫ, uḫ'' in Akkadian, and so effectively is a coda consonant even there.

Syntax

Elamite cuneiform is similar to that of

except for a few unusual features. For example, the primary function of CVC glyphs was to indicate the two consonants rather than the syllable. Thus certain words used the glyphs for "tir" and "tar" interchangeably and the vowel was ignored. Occasionally, the vowel is acknowledged such that "tir" will be used in the context "ti-rV". Thus "ti-ra" might be written with the glyphs for "tir" and "a" or "ti" and "ra". Elamite cuneiform allows for a lot of freedom when constructing syllables. For example, CVC syllables are sometimes represented by using a CV and VC glyph. The vowel in the second glyph is irrelevant so "sa-ad" and "sa-ud" are equivalent. Additionally, "VCV" syllables are represented by combining "V" and "CV" glyphs or "VC" and "CV" glyphs that have a common consonant. Thus "ap-pa" and "a-pa" are equivalent.

Notes

References

*Reiner, Erica. 2005.
Elamite
''International Encyclopedia of Linguistics.'' Ed. William J. Frawley. Oxford University Press. Oxford Reference Online (accessed 5 November 2008) *Khačikjan, Margaret. 1998. "The Elamite Language". ''Documenta Asiana IV, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Istituto per gli Studi Micenei ed Egeo-Anatolici.'' *Peter T. Daniels and William Bright. 1996. "The World's Writing Systems". Published by Oxford University Press. *George S. Starostin. On the Genetic Affiliation of the Elamite Language. // Originally in: Mother Tongue, v. VII. 2002, pp. 147–170

External links

Elamite bricks from the Museum of Hotel Sandelin (France, Saint-Omer) – Pauline Leroy 2020
* ttps://cdli.ucla.edu/pubs/cdlb/2020/cdlb2020_001.html A New Edition of the Elamite Version of the Behistun Inscription (II) – Saber Amiri Parian 2020 {{list of writing systems Elamite language Old Persian language Obsolete writing systems Cuneiform Persian scripts Logographic writing systems