Alphabet Key To History Of Mankind

Author(s): David Diringer
Publisher: Hutchinsons Scientific and Technical Publications

Page 55

54
THE ALPHABET
modern Persian province of Khuzistan. Elam is frequently mentioned in the Bible and in many Babylonian and Assyrian inscriptions. For many centuries, it was one of the main important kingdoms of western Asia, but about 640 B.C. it lost its independence to Assyria. Its early history is closely interwoven with that of southern Mesopotamia. Its ancient civilization was equal to the contemporary civilization of the Sumerians and the Mesopotamian Semites. The country was inhabited by non-Semitic and non-Indo-European tribes who spoke agglutinative dialects apparently related to the Caucasian group of languages.
Early Elamite Script
The early Elamites possessed an indigenous script; there are nine inscriptions in stone and some hundreds of clay tablets extant. The characters are of geometric linear type; they derive probably from pictographic symbols (Fig. 24), but their original forms are not always known.
acc
Fishes
A$100
Trees
4
Vases
Man
DAD
Quadruped
***}
Fig. 24-1, Elamite decorative motifs. 2, Early Elamite pictorial symbols
The direction of the script is generally from right to left, but sometimes, from left to right or mixed. This early Elamite script, which has been partly deciphered, appears to be somewhat connected with the early form of cuneiform writing, but it does not seem to be its direct offspring. It may be (1) that both the scripts have derived from another more primitive writing; or (2) that one of them was invented earlier, while the other is an artificial creation impelled by the idea-diffusion or stimulus-diffusion, a term recently suggested by the American scholar A. L. Kroeber for the knowledge of the existence of writing (see also p. 58); it is "an instance of the borrowing of an idea," as Mr. O. G. S. Crawford called it.