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 :-)
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.
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.
[+] [-] lolc|7 years ago|reply
> 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 :-)
[+] [-] sevensor|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elangoc|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] benbreen|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thechao|7 years ago|reply