Francois Desset
The Proto-Elamite tablets of ancient Iran may have been created for bookkeeping and to keep track of people and materials more than 5,000 years ago, French archaeologist and linguist François Desset said at a lecture in the city on Tuesday. Desset, who is known for proposing a decipherment of the 4,000-year-old Linear Elamite script, is here to deliver three lectures on Linear and Proto-Elamite writing systems and Elamite, an extinct language spoken by the ancient civilization of Elam in southwestern Iran. On deciphering the more than 5,300-year-old Proto-Elamite script, Desset said he was studying its unique symbols and their variants.
Email your feedback with name and address to [email protected] You Can Also Check: Gold Rate in Chennai | Silver Rate in Chennai | Bank Holidays in Chennai | Public Holidays in Chennai | Chennai AQI | Weather in Chennai | Petrol Price in Chennai | Diesel Price in Chennai | CNG Price in Chennai | LPG Price in Chennai Stay updated with the latest Chennai news.
The semantic range of writing expanded with the emergence of royal inscriptions and private letters in the middle of the third millennium BCE, he said. Asked whether the decipherment of Linear Elamite could help in understanding the Indus script, Desset said the two scripts were completely independent. We know that Elamite was spoken in the third millennium BCE in southeastern Iran, which is not very far from the Indus Valley,” he said. “I think Elamite should also be considered as a hypothesis,” he said. “Identifying variants will help us to decipher Proto-Elamite script,” he said.
The lectures were organised by the Roja Muthiah Research Library and the Tamil Nadu State Department of Archaeology. “The Indus Valley script is a logosyllabic script, with many signs shaped like animals and human beings – forms that are not found in the Elamite language. We should perhaps consider the Elamite hypothesis when studying the Indus script. Most hypotheses on the Indus script suggest it could be a Proto-Dravidian language, while a recent proposal has suggested Sanskrit. Download the TOI App.
The first works of literature and poetry appeared around 2300 BCE, although poetry and literature may have existed in oral traditions even before writing emerged.
These managers were trying to create a tool to manage complex activities such as recording whom they had given wheat to, or which shepherd had received 15 sheep and was expected to return 20 after a year.
That could have been the social context in which ancient writing systems were invented,” he told TOI. “The earliest form of writing could have been produced by managers of warehouses to keep track of goods, or of the people they paid or employed.