The Puzzle of Proto-Elamite (2013) | Hacker News Reader

The Puzzle of Proto-Elamite (2013)

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28 pointsHooke11 comments

As somebody who actually participated in an effort to decipher Linear-Elam, I'm a surprised at the speculation over Proto-Elam in this article. To the people I work with, it was always clear that Proto-Elam tablets were written for accounting.

> Early attempts at decipherment were also confounded by numerical errors and the sloppy writing of the original tablets

As you would expect. Imagine writing receipt slips by hand.

> Jacob Dahl believes that some of the signs are being used to indicate syllables, making these the first texts in the world to use a syllabary.

Well "some" here means "not many". Probably names.

The reason that decipherment of Proto-Elamite stalled is not for lack of material. It's because accounting is boring. That's not to say I wouldn't want to participate :-)

Interesting! Can you say a little more about the efforts you participated in? I've always been fascinated by this kind of thing.

I sent you a mail.

Same here, can you let me know, too? I'm just an idle observer, more often interested in consuming the polished findings, but am utterly fascinated and impressed by the work required to get there.

Give me a way to contact you :-)

The sheer age of the tablets is astounding; two thousand years before the fall of Troy, there are accountants tabulating sheep! One thousand years before the fall of Troy there were other accountants tabulating sheep, to whom the first set of accountants would have seemed unspeakably distant. History never fails to shock me with how big it is.

One example of this that I love: the Papyrus Lansing from Middle Kingdom Egypt, which is maybe the world's oldest surviving example of career advice. It's both jarringly modern (encouraging teenagers to aim for office jobs, basically) and also bizarrely outlandish. One of the points the text gives in favor of being a scribe is that your name will be remembered -- and indeed, we still know the text's author by name: Nebmare-nakht.

"Do you not recall the (fate of) the unskilled man? His name is not known... Be a scribe, and be spared from soldiering! You call and one says: "Here I am." You are safe from torments. Every man seeks to raise himself up. Take note of it!"

http://www.u.arizona.edu/~afutrell/w%20civ%2002/paplansing.h...

Can you also comment on how the current decipherments are going? And how much progress has been made in the Dravido-Elamite angle?

This book came out that republishes incomplete research that establishes cognates and place name parallels, although no grammatical connections made. In light of the progress made in the IVC script, it seems compelling. https://tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=79&artid=38813

In the meantime since this article was published in 2013, for IVC in terms of a Dravidian language, there's been a lot of progress in terms of script decipherment (to the point where the theory has become proof), archaeology, and DNA analysis that support each other consistently.

Sorry, my comment above was at the very limit of my knowledge. I was the odd non-linguist in the group.

The thesis that the IVC language may have been related to Dravidian is dead as a dodo. Only Tamil nationalists pursue it. There's really nothing to the Elamo Dravidian hypothesis also. For a time it was pushed feverishly by a David McAlpin. The theory rested on a slender footing. Essentially there was a Dravidian affiliated language called Brahui spoken in Baluchistan by a small number which raised possibility of IVC language being Dravidian and at another remove, an Elamo Dravidian language family. But the Brahui language is now accepted by most experts as a medieval period (i.e., 1000-1600 AD) immigrant into the highlands of Baluchistan from Central India. This has basically blown the stuffing off the Dravidian hypothesis for IVC - not that it was ever very strong. The Dravidian language family, in the opinion of experts, continues to be an isolate confined to southern India.

Many of the tablets can be found here: http://cdli.ox.ac.uk/wiki/doku.php?id=proto-elamite .

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