
The Puzzle of Proto-Elamite (2013) - Hooke
https://www.historytoday.com/mark-ronan/puzzle-proto-elamite
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lolc
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 :-)

~~~
elangoc
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](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.

~~~
Hillsborough
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.

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

