Elamite Black Stone Monkey, 2100 BCE - 1500 BCE
Elam was an ancient Pre-Iranic civilization centered in the far west and southwest of what is now modern-day Iran, stretching from the lowlands of the actual Khuzestan and Ilam Provinces,...
Elam was an ancient Pre-Iranic civilization centered in the far west and southwest of what is now modern-day Iran, stretching from the lowlands of the actual Khuzestan and Ilam Provinces, encompassing as well a small part of southern Iraq. Elam is actually a modern name, stemming from the Sumerian transliteration Elam. The Elamites called their country Haltamti, whereas in Akkadian it was known as Elamû, as for all classical sources Elam was known as Susiana, a name deriving from its capital, Susa.
Our knowledge of Elamite history remains largely fragmentary, with numerous historical facts being purely reconstructed, by being based on mainly Mesopotamian (Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian and Babylonian) sources.
Knowledge about the Elamite religion is scant, though we do know that the Elamites practised polytheism. Elamite is traditionally thought to be a language isolate, and completely unrelated to the neighbouring Semitic, Sumerian and the later Indo-European Iranian languages that came to dominate the region. It was written in a cuneiform adapted from the Semitic Akkadian script of Assyria and Babylonia, although the very earliest documents were written in the quite different "Linear Elamite" script. In 2006, two even older inscriptions in a similar script were discovered at Jiroft to the east of Elam, leading archaeologists to speculate that Linear Elamite had originally spread from further east to Susa. It seems to have developed from an even earlier writing known as "proto-Elamite", but scholars are not unanimous on whether or not this script was used to write Elamite or another language, as it has not yet been deciphered. Several stages of the Elamite language have been attested, the earliest dating back to the 3rd millennium BC, the latest to the Achaemenid Empire.
The Elamite language may have survived as late as the early Islamic period (roughly contemporary with the early medieval period in Europe). Among other Islamic medieval historians, Ibn al-Nadim, for instance, wrote that "The Iranian languages are Fahlavi (Pahlavi), Dari, Khuzi, Persian and Suryani (Assyrian)", and Ibn Moqaffa noted that Khuzi was the unofficial language of the royalty of Persia, "Khuz" being the corrupted name for Elam.
Our knowledge of Elamite history remains largely fragmentary, with numerous historical facts being purely reconstructed, by being based on mainly Mesopotamian (Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian and Babylonian) sources.
Knowledge about the Elamite religion is scant, though we do know that the Elamites practised polytheism. Elamite is traditionally thought to be a language isolate, and completely unrelated to the neighbouring Semitic, Sumerian and the later Indo-European Iranian languages that came to dominate the region. It was written in a cuneiform adapted from the Semitic Akkadian script of Assyria and Babylonia, although the very earliest documents were written in the quite different "Linear Elamite" script. In 2006, two even older inscriptions in a similar script were discovered at Jiroft to the east of Elam, leading archaeologists to speculate that Linear Elamite had originally spread from further east to Susa. It seems to have developed from an even earlier writing known as "proto-Elamite", but scholars are not unanimous on whether or not this script was used to write Elamite or another language, as it has not yet been deciphered. Several stages of the Elamite language have been attested, the earliest dating back to the 3rd millennium BC, the latest to the Achaemenid Empire.
The Elamite language may have survived as late as the early Islamic period (roughly contemporary with the early medieval period in Europe). Among other Islamic medieval historians, Ibn al-Nadim, for instance, wrote that "The Iranian languages are Fahlavi (Pahlavi), Dari, Khuzi, Persian and Suryani (Assyrian)", and Ibn Moqaffa noted that Khuzi was the unofficial language of the royalty of Persia, "Khuz" being the corrupted name for Elam.