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Tom Stevenson on the deciphering of Linear Elamite
Decipherment has attracted more than its fair share of formidable scholars, enthusiastic amateurs and crackpots, all...
Decipherments of ancient scripts are often attributed, and sometimes misattributed, to individual scholars: Jean-Jacques Barthélemy and the Phoenician alphabet, Champollion and Egyptian hieroglyphs, Magnus Celsius and Staveless Runes, Michael Ventris and Linear B, Edward Hincks and Akkadian cuneiform, Yuri Knorozov and Maya glyphs. But they filled the Louvre with remarkable artefacts: the life-size headless statue of Queen Napir-Asu, the bronze Sit Shamsi model, depicting crouched figures in an enigmatic religious act, brilliant gold statuettes of worshippers and some of the oldest examples of writing in the world. ‘If I had not fought to see the kunanki we would still not have deciphered Linear Elamite writing … I shouldn’t, but I react very badly to that idea.’ He believes the damage done by past excavators – of which European archaeologists on permitted digs were far from innocent – would be compounded by ignoring the historical evidence they unearthed.
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