French archaeologist cracks 4,000-year-old Elamite script from Iran

French archaeologist François Desset has successfully cracked the 4,000-year-old Linear Elamite script from ancient Iran, a major breakthrough that unlocks one of the last undeciphered writing systems of the Ancient Near East. This achievement, compared to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, promises to reveal new details about a powerful Bronze Age civilization that thrived in what is now southwestern Iran. The key to this linguistic puzzle came not from a single 'Rosetta Stone' but from studying previously inaccessible inscriptions on silver vessels from the Mahboubian Collection in London. Desset and his team painstakingly identified recurring royal names, most notably that of the Elamite ruler Shilhaha, which allowed them to assign phonetic values to many of the script's geometric signs. This method, similar to how Jean-François Champollion unlocked Egyptian hieroglyphs, is now opening a direct window into the administrative, religious, and political life of the Elamite civilization, which often interacted with Mesopotamian powers. While around 95% of the Linear Elamite signs are now believed to be deciphered, the full translation of all texts remains an ongoing academic endeavor, partly due to the limited number of surviving inscriptions and some scholarly debate. Desset now plans to apply this newfound knowledge to the even older and still largely undeciphered Proto-Elamite script, potentially reshaping our understanding of the very origins of writing and ancient Iranian history.