The Elamites

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In the second half of the twelfth century BCE a highland king named Shutruk-Nahhunte carried home from the plains of Babylonia a tall slab of black diorite, the law-stele of Hammurabi, already five centuries old when his soldiers loaded it for the road east. He set it up among his own gods at Susa. He meant, the inscriptions of his dynasty suggest, to cut his own dedication across its lower face, erasing some columns of the old Babylonian king’s laws to make room — a conquering script laid over a conquered one. The plan was never carried out. The erased band stayed blank, and the stele stood at Susa until a French expedition lifted it out of the ground in the winter of 1901, three and a half thousand years after the Elamites had dragged it up from the plain. It went to the Louvre. The man who took it has no monument of his own there. The habit of carrying other peoples’ gods and laws and victory-monuments home into the mountains is among the most legible things the Elamites left behind, and it says something exact about who they were: a people of the high country who lived their whole long history with one foot on the edge of someone else’s world.

A people of two countries

The Elamites called themselves, or their land, Haltamti — a word that seems to mean something like “the highland,” the lifted-up country. The name by which the rest of antiquity knew them ran the other way through the same idea: to their lowland neighbors in the cities of the Tigris and Euphrates they were the people of Elam, from a root carrying the sense of height, the east, the mountains that walled the Mesopotamian plain. Both names point at the same fact. The Elamites were, before anything else, a highland people — and yet the city that gives them their face in the museums, Susa, sits not in the highlands at all but down on the flat alluvium of Khuzestan, at the very lip of the Mesopotamian world, watered by the same kind of river-and-canal agriculture as the cities to its west.

That contradiction was the structure of the people. The Elamites occupied two countries at once and were never fully at home reducing themselves to either. Down on the Susiana plain lay Susa, an old and rich lowland city whose markets in the third millennium drew goods from as far as the Indus, oriented westward into the orbit of Sumer and Akkad and Babylon. Up in the Zagros, in the highlands of modern Fars, lay Anshan — the upland country of valleys and pastoral kingship, opening east onto the Iranian plateau and the long overland routes that brought lapis from Afghanistan, tin, carnelian, chlorite, the raw goods the lowland kingdoms could not supply themselves. The Elamites were the brokers who sat astride that traffic. And the most durable royal title their kings ever used names both halves and refuses to let either swallow the other: king of Anshan and of Susa.

Power between the two countries oscillated for three thousand years. A dynasty would rise out of the highlands and seize the plain; the lowland capital would be lost and the gods carried back up into the mountains for safekeeping; a regent at Susa would answer to a great king somewhere in the Zagros. To read the Elamites as a single capital with provinces, the way their neighbors imagined their own empires, is to miss them. They were a confederation braided from two ecologies and two senses of what a king was, and the braid held, loosely, longer than any kingdom on the plain below them lasted.

The tongue that belonged to no one

What sealed the Elamites off as a distinct people, more than any border, was their language. Elamite is a true isolate. It is not Semitic, like the Akkadian of Babylon and Assyria; it is not Sumerian; it is not Indo-European, like the Persian that would one day surround and outlast it. Generations of linguists have tried to marry it to Dravidian in the east or to the Caucasus languages in the north, and none of the matches has held. Elamite stands alone, related to no living tongue and to no securely identified dead one — a whole civilization’s speech with no cousins.

They wrote it, at first, in a script of their own. Around the late third millennium BCE, in the brief moment when a king of Awan named Puzur-Inshushinak (Kutik-Inshushinak in the Elamite reading) pulled the country together, Elamite scribes set down their language in what is now called Linear Elamite — a script with no debt to the cuneiform of the plain, descended in some still-argued way from an even older and undeciphered Proto-Elamite administrative writing used at Susa centuries before. Linear Elamite is rare; only a few dozen inscriptions survive, many of them on silver vessels and royal monuments. For most of antiquity it was a closed door. It was only in 2022 that François Desset and a team of colleagues published, in the Zeitschrift für Assyriologie, a proposed reading of the script — debated, not yet settled, but the first sustained attempt to make the Elamites’ own indigenous writing speak in their own words rather than through the cuneiform of their neighbors.

For the long middle of their history the Elamites borrowed that neighboring cuneiform and bent it to their isolate tongue, leaving administrative archives, royal dedications, and treaty texts. Even where the signs can now be sounded out, the sense often will not come; scholars compare the situation to Etruscan, where the script yields up its phonetics faster than its meaning. The gods, the royal ideology, the very theology of the people reach the present refracted through a language still being learned. That refraction is itself part of the story of the Elamites: a people whose inner life survives mostly in a half-read tongue.

The gods of the lord of the city

The Elamites kept a pantheon of their own — in long, intimate contact with the gods of Sumer and Babylon, trading divine names back and forth across the frontier, but never simply a province of Mesopotamian religion. At the height of the great kingdom, in the centuries either side of 1200 BCE, three powers stood over the rest.

Napirisha, “the great god,” was the supreme deity of the highlands, the god of Anshan, named first in the royal invocations — and the order is a confession of where the kings believed power truly lived, up in the mountains rather than down on the rich plain. Inshushinak, whose name means plainly “lord of Susa,” was the patron of the lowland capital and a god of the underworld, the keeper of oaths before whom the Elamite dead were brought for judgment, escorted by the deities Lagamar and Ishmekarab, powers bound up with law and the weight of the sworn word. The third was Kiririsha, “the great lady,” the chief goddess of the highlands, often set beside Napirisha as the divine couple of Anshan. Behind them moved a wide company: Humban, an ancient god of the divine power of kingship, whose name the later Neo-Elamite kings wove into their own; Pinikir, a celestial mother-goddess of great antiquity, sometimes equated with the Mesopotamian Ishtar; Nahhunte the sun and lord of justice and the market; the herald Simut; and others whose names survive without their stories.

Running through the whole of it was a concept the Elamites called kiten — a divine, protective, oath-enforcing power that lived in the gods and could be summoned to guard a treaty or to fall upon whoever broke it. It is the nearest thing in the surviving record to the inner grammar of Elamite religion: the binding force of the divine word, the sense that an oath sworn before Inshushinak was not a promise but a thing with teeth. Kings styled themselves servants of these gods, tending sanctuaries in sacred groves as well as in built temples, and recording their piety course by course in the inscribed brick of the walls they raised.

Dur-Untash: the mountain rebuilt on the plain

The single most eloquent monument the Elamites left is the great stepped tower at Chogha Zanbil, the modern name for the ancient Dur-Untash, “the fortress of Untash.” Around the middle of the thirteenth century BCE — about 1250 BCE, in the conventional reckoning — the king Untash-Napirisha founded a wholly new sacred city some thirty kilometers southeast of Susa, walled in three concentric circuits, with temples, palaces, and a complex of vaulted underground royal tombs. It was a deliberate act of gathering: a place built to draw the gods of both the highlands and the plain into one precinct, the divided country made whole in brick.

The ziggurat of Chogha Zanbil (Dur-Untash), raised by Untash-Napirisha c. 1250 BCE and dedicated chiefly to Inshushinak and Napirisha. Photograph by Wikimedia user Zereshk, CC BY-SA 3.0.

At the center rose a ziggurat dedicated above all to Inshushinak and Napirisha, the lord of Susa and the great god of Anshan together. Its construction is itself unusual: it began as a single-storey temple on a square platform and was then enclosed and built upward into a stepped tower of five levels, the upper terraces rising from within the structure rather than being stacked on the courses below — a tower grown from the inside out. Built of a sun-dried mud-brick core under a thick mantle of baked brick, it stood on a base roughly 105 meters to a side and rose, by estimate, to some 53 meters, crowned by a high temple now gone. Every tenth course of the baked facing carries a band of bricks inscribed with the king’s dedication, in Elamite and in Akkadian, so that the monument is also a text — a wall that announces, course by course, for which god it was made.

The sacred precinct held further temples to Kiririsha, Pinikir, Humban, and others. But the city was never finished. Thousands of unused bricks lay where the builders left them; the work seems to have stopped not long after Untash-Napirisha died, the ceremonial capital abandoned almost as soon as it was raised. What remains is among the best-preserved structures of its kind anywhere — the largest ziggurat outside Mesopotamia, surviving to nearly half its height, drawn back out of the ground across nine seasons between 1951 and 1962 by the French archaeologist Roman Ghirshman, and in 1979 the first site in all of Iran inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

The art of carrying the gods home

The Elamites are remembered in their neighbors’ records mainly for the thing they did to those neighbors: they came down off the highland edge and broke the cities of the plain, and they took the cities’ gods and monuments away with them. It was not random looting. To carry off a city’s chief god was, in the logic of the age, to carry off the city’s power — and the Elamites practiced it with a thoroughness that has, by an accident of history, made their plunder-rooms into the great museums of Mesopotamian art.

The law-stele of Hammurabi, hauled from Babylonia to Susa by the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte in the twelfth century BCE and excavated there in 1901–02. Photograph by Mbzt, CC BY 3.0.

In the twelfth century BCE the Shutrukid kings — Shutruk-Nahhunte and his sons Kutir-Nahhunte and Shilhak-Inshushinak — turned westward and shattered the exhausted Kassite dynasty of Babylon. They brought home to Susa some of the most celebrated objects of the Mesopotamian past: the cult statue of Marduk, Babylon’s own god, lifted from his temple; the statue and inscribed obelisk of the Akkadian king Manishtushu; the victory-stele of Naram-Sin of Akkad, that king of an empire already a thousand years dead, carved with his image climbing a mountain over his trampled enemies; and the law-stele of Hammurabi. On the Naram-Sin stele, Shutruk-Nahhunte added his own Elamite inscription, recording that he had taken it and carried it to the land of Elam — the highland king signing the trophy of a vanished plain. When Jacques de Morgan’s French mission excavated the acropolis of Susa around the turn of the century — the Naram-Sin stele in 1898, the Code of Hammurabi in the winter of 1901-02 — these were the things that came out of the ground. The most famous Mesopotamian monuments in the world were found not in Mesopotamia but in Elam, where the highlanders had dragged them three thousand years before.

The victory-stele of Naram-Sin of Akkad, carried to Susa by Shutruk-Nahhunte, who cut his own Elamite inscription into it; recovered at Susa in 1898. Photograph by Rama, CC BY-SA 3.0 FR.

The triumph did not last. The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar I struck back near the end of the twelfth century, broke Elamite power, and carried the stolen Marduk home again; and the record falls dark for almost three hundred years. A Neo-Elamite revival followed, with kings ruling once more from Susa and Anshan and pressing — usually as the losing party — against the relentless Assyrian north. Around 646 BCE the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal sacked Susa and boasted in his annals that he had sown it with salt and silence and carried off its gods in turn; the archaeology shows the boast outran the deed, for Elamite cities and culture went on past it. But the political center never recovered its weight.

The people who became Persians

The end of the Elamites is unusual among ancient peoples in that it has no real moment of ending. They were not exterminated and they were not driven out. In the same centuries that Assyria was battering Susa, an Iranian-speaking people — the Persians — were settling into the highlands of Anshan and living among the Elamites who were already there. Out of that long intermarriage of highland Elam and incoming Persian rose the line that would become the Achaemenids. The Persian kings took up the old Elamite royal style; Cyrus and his forebears called themselves, on their own seals and bricks, king of Anshan, wearing the title of the Elamite mountains.

When that line built the largest empire the world had yet seen, it did not bury the Elamite inheritance — it absorbed it. The Persians made Susa one of the royal capitals of the empire and raised a palace there. They took the Elamite language and its cuneiform into the working heart of their administration: the great archive of clay tablets recording the rations and movements of the empire’s workers at Persepolis, tens of thousands of documents, was written in Elamite, the speech of a people who had ceased to be a power in their own right and yet kept the empire’s accounts. And when Darius cut his great proclamation of victory into the cliff at Bisotun, around 520 BCE, he had it carved in three languages and three cuneiform scripts — Old Persian, Babylonian, and Elamite — so that the tongue of the highland country stood, one of three, on the founding monument of Persia. It was the Elamite version among those three that would later help unlock the reading of cuneiform itself.

What the highland kept and lost

The Elamites worshipped their own gods in their own isolate tongue for three thousand years, and then they did not so much fall as dissolve — into the Persian population that had grown up among them, into the empire that kept their script and let their gods go quiet. By the time the Magi and the fire-altars of the new Iranian religion held the plateau, Inshushinak the lord of Susa and Napirisha the great god of the mountains had no worshippers left. For long centuries afterward the Elamites survived in the Western imagination as little more than a name — the “Elam” of the Hebrew table of nations, reckoned an eldest son of Shem, which is the biblical genealogist’s way of personifying a land to the east, not the memory of a people with a history.

The recovery has been slow and is recent. The French mission that began with de Morgan in the 1890s, and the decades of excavation at Susa and Chogha Zanbil that followed, drew the lowland half of the civilization back into daylight; the highland half, around Anshan at modern Tal-e Malyan, came later and is known far more thinly. The standard synthesis of that long labor stands in Daniel Potts’s The Archaeology of Elam and in the multi-author Elamite World, and the script the Elamites invented for themselves has only in the last few years been made, partially and contentiously, to speak. A people who once descended from the mountains to carry off the gods of Babylon spent more than two millennia as a name in a king-list, and have been pieced back together, brick by inscribed brick, only in the lifetime of the museums that hold their plunder. The lord of the city judges no one now; but the wall Untash-Napirisha built still says, course by course, for whom it was raised.

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