The Decipherment of Very Ancient Scripts from Iraq and Iran
In this lecture I will first outline the methods for decipherment of the Uruk period texts established by Friberg, Damerow, and Englund, using information from the numerical notations, comparisons with later administrative texts, and knowledge of processes in food production in early societies, while adding some comments on my own work on the proto-Elamite texts, largely based on the same method. I will then discuss currents trends and possibilities in the decipherment of very ancient scripts from Iraq and Iran, beginning with my own, simple computer assisted graphotactical analysis of porto-Elamite, before looking the vastly more complex work by colleagues such as Kelley and colleagues and Sproat. The talk will end with an assessment whether the very ancient scripts of Iraq and Iran developed any sort of phonetic coding, and a discussion of more recent claims about the decipherment of these scripts and what a decipherment of proto-cuneiform and proto-Elamite would look like.
