THE by ERICA REINER

Foreword The manuscript of this grammatical sketch was submitted to the publishers in January, 1960. I wish to express my thanks to them for the privilege of making a few changes and additions in the proof for the purpose of bringing the manuscript up to date. I also had the opportunity to add two sections, one containing a new treatment of certain parts of the phonology which were treated in a different or less complete manner in the itself, and the other a translation of and commentary on the recently discovered Middle Elamite bilingual text. Chicago, December, 1966.

Introduction

SHORT HISTORY OF ELAMITE STUDIES It is well known to the historian and the philologist of the that the trilingual inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings served as the main starting point to the decipherment of the languages written in the script. After G. F. GROTEFEND had identified in 1802 the language of the "first column" as -which he called Zend-and the as alphabetic script, and opened the path for the decipherment through comparison with Sanskrit and Avestan, it was soon recognized that the "third column" was in Babylonian, written with a different set of cuneiform characters in a syllabic script; the decipherment of this language steadily progressed from then on, aided substantially by comparison with the related languages of the Semitic family. It was the "second column" of Darius' inscription that longest resisted the efforts of scholars, although study of it had begun even earlier than that of the Babylonian text. The language, variously called Median, Scythian, Susian, Elamite, etc., was found to be without linguistic kin, THE ELAMITE LANGUAGE 55

and, in fact, has resisted successful comparison with any other known linguistic family up to the present day 1). However, due to the efforts of the pioneers WESTERGAARD, HINCKS, RAWLINSON, 0PPERT, NORRIS and others, a first attempt to read and interpret the "second column" was soon made, and the Achaemenid royal inscriptions could be considered deciphered with the publication of F. H. WEISSBACH's "Die Achameniden• inschriften zweiter Art", Leipzig 1890 (later superseded by the same author's "Die Keilinschriften der Achameniden" [Vorderasiatische Bibliothek III, r9n]). About that time, when the French excavations at , the capital of , turned up a number of texts written in the same language, decipherment and understanding were given fresh impetus, largely due to the ingenuity of that most imaginative and original of scholars, Father Vincent Schei!. The interest of scholars working on the Elamite texts has as a rule been centered on one or the other of the main periods and text groups. Royal Achaemenid Elamite, i.e., the Elamite of the royal texts written by the Achaemenian Darius and his successors (henceforth abbreviated as RAE), was the first to claim the attention of scholars, and has had a renewal of interest in recent years since the excavations of the Persian Expedition of the Oriental Institute at Persepolis, under first E. HERZ• FELD, then ERICH SCHMIDT, yielded not only additional royal inscriptions, but also over two thousand administrative tablets found in the forti• fication wall (hereafter called Fortification tablets), and in the Treasury (the so-called Treasury tablets) 2). In fact, it is the only period-resp. dialect-of Elamite that has been made the subject of descriptive linguistic analysis 3). The earlier Elamite material (i.e., the texts from Susa, most of which are published in the Memoires de la Delegation en Perse, especially MDP III, V, and XI) was first interpreted by the Assyriologists ScHEIL and WEISSBACH, and attracted the non-Assyrio• logists HusING, BORK and KONIG, whose understanding of Elamite was usually biased by their attempt to establish affiliations with Caucasian languages or with Dravidian. In more recent years, important contribu• tions on detail were made by w. VON BRANDENSTEIN, and by J. FRIE• DRICH and W. F. HINZ (for details see the bibliography), and a succinct

') For an account of the decipherment, see A. J. BooTH, The Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions, London 1902; PARROT, Archeologie mt!sopotamienne. I. Les t!tapes, Paris 1946, pp. ro9ff.; S. A. PALLIS, The Antiquity of Iraq, Copenhagen 1956, Chapter III, pp. 94ff. ') A better term for these administrative documents would be, according to a suggestion of G. G. CAMERON, Achaemenid warehouse records.

') H. H. PAPER, The Phonology and Morphology of Royal Achaemenid Elamite, Ann Arbor, 1955 1 hereafter abbreviated PAPER.