00:01For over a century, archaeologists were baffled by these marks, a sequence of strange diamonds,
00:07triangles, and jagged lines appearing on stone slabs and clay tablets. This is linear Elamite.
00:14It's a 4,000-year-old writing system from ancient Iran, and until very recently, it was essentially
00:21unreadable. The script belonged to Elam, a Bronze Age power that built massive cities like Susa
00:27and Anshan, often clashing with the better-known empires of Mesopotamia. The biggest obstacle to
00:33understanding them was the sheer lack of evidence. Deciphering a dead language requires a massive
00:39amount of data to spot repeating patterns. This image shows Mesopotamian cuneiform. We have hundreds
00:45of thousands of these tablets, which made it easier to decode. Linear Elamite, by contrast, survived in
00:51only about 40 known inscriptions. Without a massive library, scholars usually look for a bilingual text.
00:57The Rosetta Stone, seen here, solved Egyptian hieroglyphs because it contained the exact same
01:04message written in three different scripts. Linear Elamite lacked that kind of perfect key.
01:10With so few symbols to analyze, the history and the personal prayers of this entire empire remained
01:17silent for 4,000 years. The investigation changed when French archaeologist François de Sette was
01:24invited to examine a private collection in a London vault. He was shown a group of ancient silver
01:30beakers. They were covered in long, wrap-in inscriptions of those same mysterious Elamite symbols.
01:37These vessels are controversial because they lack official excavation records. They are what scholars
01:43call unprovenanced. This makes them risky to study, as their exact history is unknown. But because the script
01:50was so rare, these beakers represented a massive increase in the available data. They added hundreds
01:57of new characters to the archive, turning a cold case into an active puzzle. Since de Sette didn't have a
02:04direct translation, he looked for repetition. He began searching the silver vessels for specific
02:09patterns of symbols that appeared in the same order again and again. He guessed these repeated strings were
02:15proper names, kings or gods already known from other Mesopotamian historical records. In 2017, de Sette
02:22isolated a specific sequence of four signs on the beakers. He noticed something peculiar about the
02:28structure. The third and fourth symbols were identical. He hypothesized that this was the name of the ruler
02:33shilhaha. If he was right, that repeated symbol at the end represented the sound ha. Identifying that one sound
02:40value allowed him to test it in other sequences. It worked, revealing the names of other kings and the
02:46god Napiresha. With a few confirmed sounds as a starting point, the rest of the script began to
02:51produce recognizable human speech. This led to a significant discovery about how the script actually
02:57worked. Most ancient systems, like the Egyptian hieroglyphs seen here, are a mix of different types of
03:03signs. Systems like these used symbols for phonetic sounds, but they also used logograms, pictures that
03:10represented a whole word or a concept, like a bird or a bull. De Sette argues that linear Elamite is
03:17different. His work suggests the system is purely phonetic. Instead of drawing symbols for king or god,
03:24the Elamite scribe scripture to have stripped language down to its core acoustic sounds, spelling
03:29words out syllable by syllable. If true, this was a massive technological leap in communication,
03:35a streamlined way to turn speech into symbols centuries earlier than historians assumed. For a long time,
03:43the narrative of early literacy was centered almost entirely on Mesopotamia and Egypt. This decipherment
03:50positions ancient Iran as an independent center for innovation, developing its own radical approach to
03:56the written word. Not everyone is convinced. Scholars like Jacob Dahl at Oxford argue that De Sette's team
04:03is forcing the data to fit a pattern, and they suspect word symbols are still present in the script.
04:09But even with those academic disagreements, De Sette has provided a phonetic value for over 90% of the
04:16known signs. It is a historic milestone. The translated texts reveal a world of ritual and faith. On those
04:24silver beakers, kings offer their devotion, or kere, to the gods in hopes of receiving zemi, prosperity.
04:31These recordings recover the lost voices of a forgotten empire, showing that the history of human
04:37literacy is much more geographically diverse than we once believed. Other ancient scripts are still
04:43waiting for a similar breakthrough. Which unsolved code should science tackle next?
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