Tom Stevenson on the deciphering of Linear Elamite | Hacker News Reader

Tom Stevenson on the deciphering of Linear Elamite

lrb.co.uk

102 pointseynsham24 comments

https://web.archive.org/web/20250226213901/https://www.lrb.c...

You can look at the transcribed Linear Elam corpus at https://center-for-decipherment.ch/tool/#script=elam

By enabling phonetic replacement, you can read the text of these old fragments of human writing: https://center-for-decipherment.ch/tool/#script=elam&dir=LTR...

The site grew out of an independent effort to decipher Linear Elam but these days we pretty much track what Desset is publishing. The glyphs are mapped in the Unicode private use range and strings can be copied into text documents as long as you use the provided fonts.

Thanks for the links. I found it interesting that the site was programmed using Elm; was there any particular reason for this? Also a comment on the fonts. Although I understand it is easier to combine the fonts to include a Latin script, I prefer the Google fonts approach that they only include the specific Unicode slots for a certain script. This make it easier for publications to have consistent typography, although is a hassle to an extend. What program do researchers in the field normally use for papers? I use LuaLaTeX and easy to map macros to print the right glyph.

Regarding Elm: At the time it worked very well for our use case. It still builds fine, but now it doesn't look like Elm is viable long term.

As for the font: The font pack did include an unmerged font with just the glyphs. I'm not clear why that isn't included anymore. But to make it easy to publish, I'd create merged fonts of the desired typefaces, so the editing is smooth. It's just that most font licenses do not allow publishing derivatives.

Why would you want to set up macros when you can just copy the chars into the doc? There are many sign variants and there are no established names for these glyphs. It really helps to just see the sign instead some macro name.

The state of the art for researchers in this field is copying image files for each glyph into their docs. It is that bad. So being able to work with Unicode strings is a huge improvement.

Thanks. Yes copying Unicode strings is a common practice and I use it for some of the scripts I am writing about. I am busy with a write-up that spans almost all known scripts, for some scripts macros work better for me as I can type \LE{180} and get the glyph No. 180 and \LE[2]{180} to get variant 2 etc., and the star version \LE*{..} can do something else.

Ah yes the merged fonts can get unwieldy when you want to use multiple scripts in the same doc.

A very well written article. Of interest also is the story of the Mahoubian collection, see http://mahboubiancollection.com/life-and-works/art-robbery-i... its confiscation in New York and following trials.

That is chilling...

The academic paper is here https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361675439_The_Decip...

It looks convincing to me. It's exactly the same method used to decipher cuneiform, starting with proper names in certain inscriptions and then figuring out the content of other inscriptions somewhat like a crossword puzzle. The fact that one of the tablets turns out to record the syllabary in order is especially compelling.

Funny anecdote from a friend who worked with Linear Elam and was very skeptical of the Desset proposal: When he applied the proposed decipherment to a short inscription on a pot, it read "God condemns who takes this vase", freely translated :-)

Earlier proposals had swathes of special cases to account for inconsistencies. They were not credible. This one works!

Why can't I find any reference to the 11th century Arabic book "The Book of Mad Desire for the Knowledge of Written Symbols" referenced in the article?

It's Ibn Wahshiyya's Kitāb Shawq al-mustahām fī maʿrifat rumūz al-aqlām ("The Book of the Desire of the Maddened Lover for the Knowledge of Secret Scripts"), on hieroglyphics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Wahshiyya -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decipherment_of_ancient_Egypti...

Related; A cryptanalytic decipherment of the Indus Script

https://www.academia.edu/78867798/A_cryptanalytic_decipherme...

Many have claimed to have deciphered those symbols, but it's not even clear that it is a script, in the sense of a way to write a language.

Did you read the paper?

Technical presentation by author at IIT, Hyderabad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pG7QKoxILwk

A bit of searching turned up this, on a discussion between the author of that paper and a critic: https://www.reddit.com/r/IndianHistory/comments/1iekde1/fina...

To be clear to others, that guy is a crank. There is no accepted decipherment of Indus Valley writing.

To be even more clear, it's Hindu nationalist propaganda, and not a serious academic paper, and there's a reason it was never published in a reputable journal.

The article was interesting.

Can someone explain:

Why is it called "linear" Elamite?

Is there unicode for linear Elamite yet?

It simply means that the symbols are composed of lines – as opposed to a system such as cuneiform.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_system#Linearity for more detail.

Thank you.

Re: Unicode, there's a preliminary proposal: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2021/21233-linear-elamite.pdf

No mention of the hypothesis about Dravidian being descended from Elamite?

Why? It's a fairly fringe theory with very little linguistic support.

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