L2/20192 20200921 Preliminary proposal to encode ProtoElamite in Unicode Anshuman Pandey
[email protected] pandey.github.io/unicode September 21, 2020 Contents 1 Introduction 2 2 Overview of the Sign Repertoire 3 2.1 Sign names . 4 2.2 Numeric signs . 4 2.3 Numeric signs with extended representations . 5 2.4 Complex capacity signs . 6 2.5 Complex graphemes . 7 2.6 Signs in compounds without independent attestation . 10 2.7 Alternate or variant forms . 11 2.8 Scribal designs . 11 3 Proposed Encoding Model 12 4 Proposed Characters 13 4.1 Numeric signs . 13 4.2 General ideographic signs . 17 5 Characters Not Suitable for Encoding 110 6 References 110 7 Acknowledgments 111 1 Preliminary proposal to encode ProtoElamite in Unicode Anshuman Pandey 1 Introduction The term ‘ProtoElamite’ refers to a writing system that was used at the beginning of the 3rd millenium BCE in the region to the east and southeast of Mesopotamia, known as Elam, which corresponds to the eastern portion of presentday Iran. The name was assigned by the French epigraphist JeanVincent Scheil in the early 20th century, who believed it to be the predecessor of a ‘proper’ Elamite script, which would have been used for recording the Elamite language, simply on account of the location of the tablets at Susa, which was the capital city of Elam. While no ‘proper’ descendent of the script has been identified, scholars continue to use the name ‘ProtoElamite’ as a matter of convention (Dahl 2012: 2). ProtoElamite is believed to have been developed from an accounting system used in Mesopotamia, in a manner similar to the development of ‘ProtoCuneiform’.