For 119 years, a script made of diamonds, curves, and geometric patterns refused to give up its secrets. Then François Desset found his Ptolemy — a king named Shilhaha, who reigned around 1950 BCE in what is now southwestern Iran.

Desset, a French archaeologist at the University of Liège, has deciphered Linear Elamite, a writing system that scholars had largely written off as uncrackable. The breakthrough has drawn comparisons to Jean-François Champollion, the philologist who unlocked Egyptian hieroglyphics in 1822.

“Of all the writing systems used in Iran, the only one that is truly local — developed within the territory we now call Iran — is Linear Elamite,” Desset told AFP. “All the others — cuneiform, the Arabic alphabet, or the Greek alphabet — were imported from the west.”

A civilization between empires

The Elamite civilization flourished on the Iranian plateau, sandwiched between the Sumerian city-states of Mesopotamia and the Indus River civilization. Its major city, Susa, sat at the fringe of the Mesopotamian plain — close enough to trade with Sumerian kingdoms, distant enough to develop its own written tradition.

Linear Elamite was the product of that independence. Used between roughly 2800 and 1900 BCE, it recorded the Elamite language — a linguistic isolate with no known living relatives, which makes the task of reading it considerably harder than simply matching symbols to sounds.

Desset’s work, published in the journal Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und vorderasiatische Archäologie, could illuminate a society that has long existed in the shadow of its better-documented neighbors. The 45 inscriptions he has assembled are frequently royal, carrying political and religious details of a civilization that formed the foundation for later Persian kingdoms, including the Achaemenid dynasty.

The key was in the names

Desset’s obsession began in 2006, during excavations in southern Iran where clay tablets bearing Linear Elamite were unearthed. “The team was both excited and embarrassed,” he recalled. “Nobody was a specialist in this script.” His doctoral thesis, originally focused on urbanism and architecture, drifted toward the undeciphered symbols — though, he admits, he never truly believed he would crack them.

For years, he hit dead ends. A crucial assumption about the Lion’s Table — a bilingual monument discovered at Susa in 1903 and held at the Louvre — turned out to be wrong. Many researchers had assumed its two texts, one in Linear Elamite and one in cuneiform, said the same thing. They didn’t. “Many researchers didn’t realize this and broke their teeth on it,” Desset said.

The breakthrough arrived in 2015, when he gained access to the Mahboubian collection — a private London archive of ancient silver vessels belonging to an Iranian family in exile. The beakers carried inscriptions in both cuneiform and Linear Elamite, and this time the parallel texts were genuine. Metallurgical analysis confirmed the vessels were ancient.

It was, Desset told Smithsonian Magazine, “the jackpot.”

Following Champollion’s method, he hunted for proper names — kings, gods, places — that appeared in readable cuneiform and could be matched to repeating symbol sequences in Linear Elamite. In a sequence of four symbols representing Shilhaha, the last two were identical, corresponding to the repeated ending of the name. From that foothold, he identified 77 phonetic signs: five vowels, 12 consonants, and 60 syllables. He and his co-authors now claim they can read more than 96 percent of known Linear Elamite symbols.

“Mostly convincing” — but not unanimous

Experts have greeted the work with cautious admiration. Manfred Krebernik, a Near Eastern studies specialist at the University of Jena, finds the case “mostly convincing.” Harvard Assyriologist Piotr Steinkeller is “quite convinced,” calling it “a major achievement.” Massimo Vidale, an archaeologist at the University of Padua, described it as “one of the major archaeological discoveries of the last decades.”

Not everyone is sold. Michael Mäder, a linguist at the University of Bern and scientific director of the Swiss Alice Kober Society, told Deutsche Welle that only about 15 characters have confirmed pronunciation. He also disputes Desset’s claim that the script is purely phonetic, citing mathematical analyses suggesting roughly 70 percent phonetic characters.

That claim — that Linear Elamite is the world’s oldest purely phonographic writing system, predating the Proto-Sinaitic script by nearly eight centuries — is the one most likely to reshape textbook timelines, and the one drawing the sharpest scrutiny.

Reading the next chapter

Desset now plans to tackle Proto-Elamite, an even older script with more than 1,600 surviving inscriptions that may be among the earliest writing systems ever created. The University of Liège currently hosts what it says is the only department in the world working simultaneously on the three oldest known writing systems: hieroglyphics, cuneiform, and Linear Elamite.

The timing of the decipherment carries a weight Desset does not avoid. At a moment when US President Donald Trump has threatened to send Iran “back to the Stone Ages,” Desset told AFP he hopes his work will “have a positive impact on Iranian culture and identity once things have returned to normal.”

The country dominating today’s headlines is the same one that, four millennia ago, produced one of humanity’s most innovative writing systems. Shilhaha’s name, silent for nearly 4,000 years, is being read again.

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