For more than a century, linguists were baffled by a Bronze Age script called Linear Elamite, used by citizens of Elam, in what is present-day Iran. Then archaeologist François Desset, above in his office in Liège, Belgium, stepped in with a new idea. Photograph by Cédric Gerbaye

ByJoshua Hammer

National Geographic 

The room we are in is locked. It is windowless and lit from above by a fluorescent bulb. In the hallway outside—two stories beneath the city of London—attendants in dark suits patrol silently, giving the scene an air of cinematic drama. We’re in the downtown safety deposit center where the Iranian British art collector Kambiz Mahboubian, keeper of one of the world’s great troves of Near Eastern ancient art, houses some of his more precious pieces under lock and key.

Sitting across from me at a small table, Mahboubian reaches gingerly into a green plastic shopping bag from Waitrose & Partners, the British supermarket chain. From it, he produces a silver beaker covered with friezes long ago hammered out in high relief. As he places the teakettle-size vessel on the table, I can see on it the image of a helmeted, barrel-chested man with a long, braided beard, his arms held outward in a gesture of devotion. Mahboubian motions for me to take a closer look. “Can I pick it up?” I ask him. “Of course,” he replies.

Neat rows of engraved symbols wrap around the object—asterisks, triangles with antenna-like appendages, hatched diamonds, lightning bolts. As I hold the beaker to the light, I catch a slight tremble in my hands: The metal is so soft and pliable that I fear it will break apart in my fingers. The beaker dates to the Early Bronze Age, meaning the craftsman who meticulously scratched these symbols into silver did so roughly 4,300 years ago. What they all mean has been a riddle that’s baffled archaeologists and historians.

The characters belong to a system of writing called Linear Elamite, which took root between 2700 and 2300 B.C. in a powerful kingdom called Elam, in what is now southwestern Iran. The Elamite writing system endured for several hundred years before it was swept aside by another script and lost to history. Then, just over a century ago, French archaeologists excavating the Elamite capital of Susa discovered 19 inscriptions written in stone and clay. The long sequences of signs clearly meant something. But what?

For decades, philologists studying the symbols in a quest to understand Linear Elamite made little progress for one big reason: The corpus of written material consisted of only about 40 inscriptions. The code-cracking researchers who piece together ancient languages generally rely on an abundance of symbols to spot repetitions, patterns, and sign clusters, the raw data that provide clues to grammar, syntax, names, and places.

One such scholar who fell into the seemingly impossible mission of making sense of Linear Elamite was François Desset, a French archaeologist whose curiosity turned into a 20-year journey to decipher the writing system. His recent headline-making claims of success have both galvanized public attention and incited skeptics. They’ve also underscored the idea that we might be at a pivotal moment in the study of these ancient scripts.

Today roughly a dozen forms of writing remain undeciphered. And a new generation of scholars has set forth, often with the aid of new technology, to reveal the last secrets of the ancients. Decipherers have used AI in recent years to locate archaeological sites, restore illegible texts, and analyze linguistic patterns to make inferences about grammar and vocabulary. But while AI has sped up the translations of languages and writings already known to a handful of scholars, the technology has yet to demonstrate the creativity needed to decode hitherto unknown scripts >>>