“still sleeping underground and had not yet spoken”

March 9, 2025 12:38 AM

Who wouldn’t want to be woken in the middle of the night, as Simon Kimmins was by his flatmate Ventris, and asked whether they would like to be ‘the second person in four thousand years to read this script’? In July 2022, the French scholar François Desset and a team of co-authors published what they claimed was proof of a decipherment of Linear Elamite, a writing system used on the Iranian plateau around four thousand years ago.

– Beyond Mesopotamia is an essay by Tom Stevenson on the decipherment of the Linear Elamite script and subsequent controversies.
posted by Kattullus (21 comments total)

Oh, I forgot to include the archive link for Stevenson’s essay

Incidentally, if anyone knows more about The Book of Mad Desire for the Knowledge of Written Symbols than is on Wikipedia, please share. Though I realize that no book can live up to that title.
posted by Kattullus at 3:24 AM on March 9 [6 favorites]

if anyone knows more about The Book of Mad Desire for the Knowledge of Written Symbols than is on Wikipedia, please share

Kitāb Shawq al-mustahām fī maʿrifat rumūz al-aqlām [archive]
posted by HearHere at 3:39 AM on March 9 [5 favorites]

so, yay bilingual archaeological finds, I guess?

So in the far far future when english is gone, researchers will dig through a Montreal midden and decipher english from french nutrition information on a fragment of a Shreddies box ...
posted by scruss at 6:35 AM on March 9 [4 favorites]

I once came across a user’s manual translated into every official EU language that was printed on plastic. If an archeologist stumbles across that in ten thousand years, it’ll be a cherished cultural artifact like nothing else.
posted by Kattullus at 6:50 AM on March 9 [14 favorites]

if anyone knows more about The Book of Mad Desire for the Knowledge of Written Symbols than is on Wikipedia, please share

aka Ancient alphabets and hieroglyphic characters explained; with an account of the Egyptian priests, their classes, initiation, and sacrifices. Academic translator, ergo more boring title.
posted by BWA at 6:59 AM on March 9 [8 favorites]

Linear Elamite can't hope to beat Exponential Elamite.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 7:10 AM on March 9 [12 favorites]

Its fascinating to me how passionately contrary some of these people are presented as being. Surely there are enough unknowns for the scholars to be nuanced in their dissertations. The articles so often instead present the protagonists as enemies.
posted by bigZLiLk at 7:15 AM on March 9 [3 favorites]

Tenure is granted through the certainty of your research. Nuance and humility are for adjuncts.
posted by at by at 8:14 AM on March 9 [3 favorites]

Thank you Kattullis

Totally-fantastic.

From there, these are my {curated} wikipedia tangents:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sinkholes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chichen_Itza
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Impact_Database
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_extinction_event_research
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_culture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniformitarianism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hutton

 "we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end"

Further, I now have a series of Lesson Plans for my kiddos!
posted by splifingate at 8:29 AM on March 9 [3 favorites]

well this is pretty cool. like, how exciting to be on this team, right? yes, not all conclusions can be verified, and much more work is still to be done, but they have unlocked the next level in this game.

and yes I too want to read The Book of Mad Desire for the Knowledge of Written Symbols, although I admit the title probably promises much more than it delivers.
posted by supermedusa at 9:40 AM on March 9

Shortened in references to just "The Book of Mad Desire", generations of future scholars were doomed to fundamentally misunderstand the work...
posted by I-Write-Essays at 9:54 AM on March 9 [2 favorites]

wow splifingate I think we might be the same person
posted by supermedusa at 9:59 AM on March 9 [1 favorite]

Linear Elamite can't hope to beat Exponential Elamite.

Kicks in the teeth of Logarithmic Elamite though.
posted by axiom at 10:03 AM on March 9 [4 favorites]

Linear Elamite can't hope to beat Exponential Elamite.

Kicks in the teeth of Logarithmic Elamite though.

(well, to be sure, it all depends on the signs...)
posted by kaibutsu at 10:50 AM on March 9 [2 favorites]

> it all depends on the signs...

It's been rumored that the signs were recorded in the apocalyptic section of the Book of Mad Desire, but those pages were lost when the book was outlawed for its corrupting influence.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 11:08 AM on March 9 [1 favorite]

I was a little baffled that Desset could read off the meaning of an Elamite inscription, with just a few untranslated words. The article says that Elamite is not related to other ancient languages of the region, so knowing the sound of a word doesn't help you guess its meaning by comparison. His deciphering was able to confirm the names of kings and gods that were already known from other texts about the Elamites, but where is he getting the semantics of the rest of the words, and the grammar?
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 12:57 PM on March 9 [1 favorite]

This is addressed in Beyond Mesopotamia, but a bit obliquely. However, the Ancient Near East Today link is clearer. Here’s the relevant paragraph:

Champollion could rely on Coptic, the descendant of the ancient Egyptian language, and Ventris started from the assumption (which turned out to be true) that Mycenaean Linear B recorded an ancient Mycenaean form of Greek. Linear Elamite script could be deciphered thanks to a previously established (albeit partial) knowledge of the Elamite language through the cuneiform writing and translations of Elamite texts into Akkadian or Old Persian. It should be stressed, however, that our knowledge of Elamite grammar and lexicon is still far from satisfactory. This causes a situation similar to that of the Etruscan language: while we are now able to read most of the texts in Linear Elamite, our understanding in several cases is still only partial. In other words, even if the decipherment of Linear Elamite script is basically achieved, the translation of the Elamite language is still problematic.

posted by Kattullus at 2:28 PM on March 9 [6 favorites]

Shortened in references to just "The Book of Mad Desire", generations of future scholars were doomed to fundamentally misunderstand the work...

It's a cookbook.
posted by Billiken at 3:28 PM on March 9 [1 favorite]

AI Is Deciphering Ancient Inscriptions That Experts Have Struggled With for Centuries

Disclaimer:
Neural networks can sometimes generate misleading translations, and machine hallucinations—where AI fills in gaps with plausible but incorrect content—remain a risk. Experts stress that AI should complement, not replace, human scholars and humans should have the last world.

I’d like to hear an experienced opinion about this. In my field, genomics, machine learning has become a common tool for deciphering genomic, and epigenetic interactions. The interesting thing about deciphering texts is that the symbols will change overtime and can mean different things depending on when they were written, so that adds a whole other level of complexity.
posted by waving at 3:39 PM on March 9

So in the 19th century translation linked by BWA, that's the translator's title for the work.. but in the translation itself, lo, bin Marwan writes (p8 if you're looking at the Internet Archive copy):

"I have arranged the work in chapters, and entitled it: The long desired Knowledge of occult Alphabets attained. With the aid of God!"

Which is honestly still pretty cool, and makes The Mad Desire for Knowledge of Written Symbols seem more plausible... I wonder if this is a case of the Arabic text being ambiguous as much as a desire for drama from some other translator.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 4:39 PM on March 9 [1 favorite]

In other words, even if the decipherment of Linear Elamite script is basically achieved, the translation of the Elamite language is still problematic.

From your lips to God's ears.
posted by y2karl at 7:51 PM on March 9