Elam

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Elam was the ancient civilization of southwest Iran, occupying the lowland plain of Khuzestan around the city of Susa and the rugged Zagros highlands to its east. For most of its long history — stretching from the late fourth millennium BCE to its absorption into the Persian world in the first — it stood as Mesopotamia’s nearest great neighbour: trading partner, military rival, and conduit between the cities of the Tigris and Euphrates and the Iranian plateau beyond. The name itself comes down through Mesopotamian and biblical usage; what the Elamites called their own land was something closer to Haltamti.

The civilization is known unevenly. Its lowland centre, Susa, was excavated extensively, and Elamite texts survive in cuneiform adapted from Mesopotamian models; but Elamite is a language isolate, related to no living tongue, and much of it remains imperfectly understood. The political history that scholarship can reconstruct moves in phases — an early period of city-states, a powerful Middle Elamite kingdom in the later second millennium BCE, and a Neo-Elamite revival before the rise of the Achaemenid Persians, who made Susa one of their own royal capitals and took the Elamite script into their administration.

Elamite religion centred on a pantheon of its own, distinct from but in long contact with the gods of Sumer and Babylon. The texts name Inshushinak, the patron deity of Susa and a god of the underworld and of oaths; Napirisha, a great god of the highlands; and the goddesses Pinikir and Kiririsha, among others. Sanctuaries were tended in sacred groves as well as in built temples, and kings styled themselves as servants of these gods. The most striking surviving monument is the ziggurat of Chogha Zanbil — ancient Dur-Untash — raised in the thirteenth century BCE by the king Untash-Napirisha as the heart of a new sacred complex dedicated chiefly to Inshushinak and Napirisha. Built of mud brick faced with baked brick and inscribed bands, it is among the best-preserved structures of its kind anywhere, and a rare window onto a temple religion that left fewer literary remains than its Mesopotamian counterpart.

Within the broader study of Western esoteric and religious roots, Elam sits at the edge of the better-mapped traditions. It is not the source of a surviving scripture or a continuous mystical lineage; its gods went silent with the language. What it offers instead is a reminder of how much religious culture in the ancient Near East existed alongside, and not merely within, the Mesopotamian world that later writers came to treat as the singular fountainhead. The Elamites worshipped their own gods in their own tongue for three thousand years, and most of what they meant by it is now beyond recovery.

→ Related: Mesopotamia