The headlines were tidy. A French archaeologist, François Desset, supposedly cracked the code of Linear Elamite, a 4,000-year-old script from the Bronze Age. The media treated it like the second coming of Jean-François Champollion. They called it a triumph of linguistic science. They claimed the "last great frontier" of ancient writing had finally been breached.
They lied.
What Desset actually produced was a clever, speculative exercise in phonetics that leaves the vast majority of the script exactly where it was: in the dark. To call this a "decipherment" is an insult to the rigor of historical linguistics. It is the academic equivalent of guessing a few letters in a game of Hangman and then claiming you’ve rewritten the dictionary.
The "lazy consensus" here is that if a researcher identifies a few proper nouns—kings' names like Puzur-Inshushinak—they have unlocked the language. They haven't. They’ve merely recognized a pattern. Identifying a label is not the same as understanding a syntax.
The Myth of the "Clean" Decipherment
History isn't a puzzle box waiting for a single key. It’s a messy, overlapping smear of dialects, regional variations, and scribe-specific errors. The Linear Elamite "breakthrough" relies on a handful of silver vessels (the Gunagi vessels) that share similar inscriptions. Desset’s team compared these to known cuneiform texts, assuming they were literal translations.
This is a massive, unproven leap.
In the world of ancient epigraphy, assuming two texts are identical because they share a name is how you build a house of cards. We see this in corporate boardrooms today: the "comparable data" fallacy. Just because two datasets look similar on the surface doesn't mean the underlying logic is the same. I’ve watched archaeological projects and tech startups alike burn through decades of funding because they fell in love with a "parallel" that didn't actually exist.
Why Phonetic Matching Isn't Reading
Desset claims to have identified about 40 signs. For context, Linear Elamite likely has over 300.
If you can recognize 10% of a script’s characters, and those characters are mostly used for names, you can't read a tax receipt, let alone a prayer or a law code. You are looking at the equivalent of a toddler recognizing the "M" in McDonald's and claiming they can read the entire menu.
The industry standard for a "deciphered" script requires three things:
- A large enough corpus to test the rules.
- A clear grammatical structure that predicts future finds.
- A distinct vocabulary that isn't just borrowed proper nouns.
Linear Elamite fails all three. The corpus is tiny—roughly 40 inscriptions. The grammar remains a black hole. The "success" is limited to a phonetic "reading" of names we already knew existed from other sources.
The Politics of Archaeological "Wins"
Why would a researcher rush to announce a total victory when the data is so thin? Because in the modern academic economy, being "first" is the only way to survive.
I’ve spent years in the trenches of data interpretation. I know the pressure to deliver a "clean" narrative. Investors (and grant committees) don't want to hear that the script is "partially understood with significant caveats." They want the Rosetta Stone. They want the headline.
Desset’s "crack" of the code happened largely during a 2020 lockdown. It was a narrative-driven PR blitz that capitalized on a world hungry for good news. But if you talk to the actual heavy hitters—scholars at the University of Chicago or Oxford who have spent decades on Elamite cuneiform—the skepticism is deafening. They know that Linear Elamite isn't a single unified system; it’s a localized experiment that likely died out because it was too clunky to compete with the Mesopotamian systems of the time.
The Failure of the "People Also Ask" Logic
When people ask, "Can we now read ancient Elamite?" the honest answer is a brutal "No."
We can read about it. We can guess at the sounds of a few royal titles. But the soul of the language—the way people structured their thoughts, their idioms, their legal logic—remains invisible.
The premise that we can "solve" history like an equation is flawed.
Imagine a scenario where a future civilization finds a pile of 21st-century emojis. They might figure out that a "heart" means love and a "fire" means something is good. Does that mean they have "deciphered" English? Of course not. They’ve decoded a few pictograms. They have zero grasp of the underlying English grammar, the irregular verbs, or the nuance of sarcasm.
That is exactly where we are with Linear Elamite. We have the emojis. We don't have the language.
The Technological Delusion
There is a growing, dangerous belief that AI will "solve" these scripts for us.
"Why don't we just run it through a neural network?"
Because AI requires massive datasets to find patterns. We have 40 inscriptions. That’s not a dataset; it’s a rounding error. When you feed a small, messy dataset into a high-powered algorithm, the machine doesn't find the truth—it hallucinates a pattern to please you. It's the "garbage in, garbage out" principle, but dressed up in the robes of "computational linguistics."
Machine learning can identify that a specific squiggle appears near a specific circle. It cannot tell you that the squiggle represents a long-lost phonetic shift unique to a specific valley in the Zagros Mountains. Human intuition is required, but human intuition is also prone to seeing what it wants to see. Desset saw a decipherment. I see a highly educated guess.
The High Cost of Certainty
The danger of this "decipherment" narrative is that it closes the book on the subject.
When the world believes a problem is solved, funding dries up. Young scholars move on to "unsolved" mysteries. The Gunagi vessels are put in a museum with a plaque that says, "Translated by François Desset," and the inquiry stops.
This is the death of science.
We should be admitting how little we know. We should be screaming from the rooftops that the Elamite plateau was a chaotic mess of competing scripts and that we are lucky to understand even 5% of it.
The Nuance Everyone Missed
Linear Elamite wasn't just a "rival" to cuneiform. It was a political statement. Using a local script was an act of defiance against the cultural hegemony of Mesopotamia. By trying to force Linear Elamite into a phonetic box that mirrors cuneiform, we are effectively colonizing the script all over again. We are assuming it must function like the systems around it.
What if it doesn't?
What if Linear Elamite isn't a standard writing system at all? What if it’s a mnemonic device? Or a prestige script used only for ritualistic branding, never intended to carry the complexities of a full spoken language? Desset’s methodology doesn't even allow for these questions. He’s too busy trying to find "Puzur-Inshushinak."
The Brutal Reality
The truth is less exciting than the headline.
We have identified some names. We have confirmed that the script is phonetic. That is the extent of the "breakthrough." Everything else—the "cracking of the 4,000-year-old code"—is academic branding.
I’ve seen this play out in the tech world a thousand times. A founder claims they’ve "solved" autonomous driving because their car stayed in the lanes for ten miles in sunny California. Then the car hits a snowstorm in Michigan and the "solution" evaporates.
Linear Elamite is in a permanent snowstorm. The data is too cold, too sparse, and too fractured.
Stop celebrating the "end" of this mystery. The work hasn't even begun. We are still standing at the base of the mountain, looking at a few footprints and claiming we’ve reached the summit.
Accept the ambiguity. Reject the tidy narrative. The script isn't cracked; it's barely scratched.
