There's finally been some good progress on the decipherment of one of the last untranslated ANE scripts, the so-called proto-Elamite. Researchers at Oxford, led by Dr. Jacob Dahl, have constructed a new system for photographing the tablets, which were really poorly made 5000 years ago, to allow them to be examined from all angles digitally. All of the new images have been added to the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, in the proto-Elamite section.
Part of the reason proto-Elamite is so hard to read is apparently the scribes weren't really very good, so the tablets seem to be much more filled with errors then the more professional Babylonian works,
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Part of the reason proto-Elamite is so hard to read is apparently the scribes weren't really very good, so the tablets seem to be much more filled with errors then the more professional Babylonian works,
It was used in administration and for agricultural records but it was not used in schools - the lack of a scholarly tradition meant that a lot of mistakes were made and the writing system may eventually have become useless as an administrative system. Eventually, the system was abandoned after some two hundred years.
(Dr. Dahl)
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