Early writing or sign systems were fragile. They could disappear leaving seemingly little trace in the systems that followed. This is true of the ancient Indus sign system. It is also true of the proto-Elamite one, which seems to have preceded the ancient Indus Valley system in the western highlands of Iran and flourished around 3300-2800 BCE, well before Harappa and Mohenjo-daro were at their peaks.

The proto-Elamite script is undeciphered despite the fact that it has signs in common with cuneiform prevalent to the west at the same time in ancient Mesopotamia. The proto-Elamite numerical system however seems to have been deciphered and is much like the Mesopotamian one. The rest of the writing is a mystery, even if unlike the Indus system we have a pretty good sense that it was used for accounting to tabulate goods and quantities, even different kinds of human beings from slaves to laborers. This article by one of its leading experts illustrates both the difficulties in deciphering an ancient representational system and offers a peak at what must have been a very dynamic world not far from the first ancient Indus cities rose soon after the Elamite demise.

There are other similarities with ancient Indus writing: most of the texts (1557 of less than 1700) were found in a single city, Susa, just like by far most Indus seals are found thus far in Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. A few signs were used a lot of the time, there was a core of 300-400 non-numerical signs, around the same number as Mahadevan and Parpola's concordances of Indus signs. We also don't really know what language they encoded. That said, the author also makes a good point to start this paper that puts everything in perspective: "The invention of writing is an important matter for us, since here lies the origin of one of the fundamental features of our civilization. But some 5000 years ago, this invention, whose success was yet to be proven, was very probably not considered as revolutionary, drawing only the attention of the few persons able to handle it in some granaries and warehouses. Only its long history and current omnipresence have given writing its importance, and these aspects should be set aside in any issue concerning its invention in order to avoid any anachronistic consideration," (p. 68).

We do know much more about the content of the proto-Elamite tablets however: "The PE tablets are exclusively local administrative documents accounting objects such as cereals, cattle or workers and attributing them sometimes to institutions or persons whose names might have been written (see below). In comparison with the contemporary proto-cuneiform tablets, their semantic field of application seemed to be more restricted since no PE lexical list was found up to now," (p. 70). Interestingly, by comparing a few of the proto-cuneiform signs that were used in nearby Mesopotamian cities like Uruk, we are able to strongly presume that some of the signs indicated higher or lower status humans, including male and female slaves, not to mention animals and containers. On the other hand, proto-Elamite and Proto-cuneiform texts have never been found in the same place despite the fact that both regions are nearly adjacent to each other, and Desset concludes that they are "sister" writing systems (p. 93). "The meaning of this mutual exclusion is still elusive. Was it due to the redundancy and pointlessness to use two different systems or did it reflect any identity border?" (p. 70).

There is a lot to ponder in this paper, including the importance of writing as a notational system that records goods, transactions, rations and other economic activity in both Mesopotamia and Elam, something that Indus writing may also to have been used for (see Semantic scope of Indus inscriptions for example). Like is the case for Indus sealings, sealings (impressions made from seals) on tablets, bullae, door and jar sealings have been found. There are also interesting speculations on the nature of the relationship between writing and the state, which Desset does not take as necessary to each other. The many issues that come up relevant to considerations about the ancient Indus civilization make this a fascinating article, worth reading more than once.

Images
1. Map of the archaeological sites where numerical/numero- ideographic (white rectangles), PE (white stars) and proto-cuneiform (white and black circles) tablets have been found.
2. The ‘hairy triangle’ on cylinder sealings and as a sign scratched on ceramic sherds (right).
3. Most frequent PE signs (Dahl 2002 : table 3).