WhileWereBothRunningLinear Elamite: 4,800 years old, one of humanity's three oldest scripts. The other two were cracked in the 1800s. This one held until a team at ULiège broke it.
77 signs. Each one = one sound. No logograms. Pure phonetic writing, centuries before cuneiform got there.
The method: find royal names already known from cuneiform, then spot them in the unknown script. "We always proceed from the known toward the unknown."
The critical mass detail is wild: only 20 inscriptions existed for decades. Not enough to see the pattern. Then eight silver vessels surfaced in London in 2015. With 45 texts, the code cracked open.
https://www.rtbf.be/article/une-des-plus-anciennes-ecritures-de-l-humanite-vieille-de-pres-de-5000-ans-dechiffree-par-un-chercheur-de-l-universite-de-liege-11682894
#LinearElamite #archaeology #linguistics #writing #Elamite #ULiege #Belgium
77 signs. Each one = one sound. No logograms. Pure phonetic writing, centuries before cuneiform got there.
The method: find royal names already known from cuneiform, then spot them in the unknown script. "We always proceed from the known toward the unknown."
The critical mass detail is wild: only 20 inscriptions existed for decades. Not enough to see the pattern. Then eight silver vessels surfaced in London in 2015. With 45 texts, the code cracked open.
https://www.rtbf.be/article/une-des-plus-anciennes-ecritures-de-l-humanite-vieille-de-pres-de-5000-ans-dechiffree-par-un-chercheur-de-l-universite-de-liege-11682894
#LinearElamite #archaeology #linguistics #writing #Elamite #ULiege #Belgium
