Have Scholars Finally Deciphered a Mysterious Ancient Script?

The paper uses newly examined inscriptions from a set of ancient silver beakers to propose a method for reading the symbols that make up Linear Elamite...

5,000 years ago, in the thriving city of Susa, on the fringe of the great Mesopotamian plain and the edge of the vast Iranian plateau that rises to the east...was at the heart of an urban society spanning much of what is today southwestern Iran. The city’s western neighbors, the Sumerians, dubbed its residents the Elamites.

French archaeologists digging in Susa at the turn of the 20th century uncovered evidence of a writing system that seemed nearly as old as cuneiform but used a different set of symbols. The system apparently fell out of use, as scribes in Susa...turned to cuneiform to write their language. 800 years later, another home-grown system took hold. Scholars dubbed the earlier system Proto-Elamite and the second... Linear Elamite; both were presumed to record the Elamite language, about which little is known.

Over the past century, archaeologists have uncovered more than 1,600 Proto-Elamite inscriptions, but only about 43 in Linear Elamite...

Desset, a French archaeologist... gained access to a private London collection of extraordinary silver vessels with a host of inscriptions in both cuneiform and Linear Elamite. Per the study, the elaborate beakers represent “the oldest and most complete examples of Elamite royal inscriptions in cuneiform.” They belonged to different rulers from two dynasties.

Some proper names written in cuneiform could now be compared with symbols in Linear Elamite—including the names of known Elamite kings, such as Šilhaha. By tracking repeated symbols that were likely proper names, Desset was able to make sense of the script, which comes in an array of geometric shapes. He also translated verbs such as “gave” and “made.”

A king of Shinar (Gen. xiv. 1, 9), who invaded the West in conjunction with Chedorlaomer, king of Elam, and others, and destroyed Sodom. The identity of the name has long been a subject of controversy among Assyriologists, and is not even yet established to the satisfaction of all scholars. Schrader was the first to suggest ("Cunciform Inscriptions and the Old Testament," ii. 299 et seq.) that Amraphel was Hammurabi, king of Babylon, the sixth king in the first dynasty of Babylon. This is now the prevailing view among both Assyriologists and Old Testament scholars. The transformation of the name Hammurabi into the Hebrew form Amraphel is difficult of explanation, though a partial clue is perhaps furnished by theexplanation of the name in a cuneiform letter as equivalent to Kimta-rapashtu (great people or family). On this basis "'am" = "Kimta" and "raphel" = "rapaltu" = "rapashtu."
Amraphel | Jewish Encyclopedia | Robert W. Rogers, Kaufmann Kohler, Marcus Jastrow

At Mari on the central Euphrates, among other rich material, a cuneiform tablet was found which established that Hammurabi of Babylonia and King Shamshi-Adad I of Assyria were contemporaries. An oath was sworn by the life of these two kings in the tenth year of Hammurabi, The finds at Mari “proved conclusively that Hammurabi came to the throne in Babylonia after the accession of Shamshi-Adad I in Assyria”... If Hammurabi reigned at the time allotted to him by the finds at Mari and Khorsabad—but according to the finds at Platanos was a contemporary of the Egyptian kings of the early Twelfth Dynasty—then that dynasty must have started at a time when, according to the accepted chronology, it had already come to its end. In conventionally-written history, by -1680 not only the Twelfth Dynasty, but also the Thirteenth, or the last of the Middle Kingdom, had expired.
Hammurabi and the Revised Chronology | Collected Essays | Immanuel Velikovsky

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.