History of the Ancient Near East · Part 5 · The first cities and kingdoms · B1–B2
Elam: Mesopotamia’s Eastern Neighbour
Part 5 of History of the Ancient Near East: for more than two thousand years, the people of Elam, in the lowlands and mountains of south-western Iran, traded, married and fought with Mesopotamia. Their capital Susa outlived Sumer, Akkad, Babylon and Assyria. The present perfect with still, yet and already (it still hasn’t been deciphered), and not only … but also, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight, a people that nearly everyone forgets: the Elamites.
I know Susa. It was one of the capitals of the Persian kings. Aeschylus set his play The Persians there.
Susa was already two and a half thousand years old when the Persians arrived. Before it was Persian, it was Elamite.
Not only wars, Marcos. Writing, art, temples, and a language that the Persian kings still used for their accounts.
Elam lay to the east of Mesopotamia, in what is now south-western Iran: the hot lowlands around Susa, and the high mountain country around Anshan. Its people spoke Elamite, a language related to no other known language. They worshipped their own gods, such as Inshushinak, lord of Susa, and the great goddess Pinikir.
Around 3100 BCE, not long after writing began in Sumer, the Elamites developed their own script, called Proto-Elamite. More than a thousand tablets survive, mostly accounts, but the script has still not been deciphered. A later script, Linear Elamite, used around 2300–1900 BCE, has recently been partly deciphered, though some scholars are not yet convinced. Later, the Elamites wrote their language in cuneiform.
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