French archaeologist and epigraphist, François Desset, specialist in Iran from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age, deciphered linear Elamite, one of the oldest writings in the world, born in present-day Iran.

Published on: 04/28/2026 - 11:11 Modified on: 04/28/2026 - 11:12

Iranian civilization, which Donald Trump threatened to annihilate in early April, is the subject of work that mobilizes all of François Desset's energy. This French researcher managed to read writing more than 4,000 years old which was until now thought to be indecipherable.

Linear Elamite is a writing system that has now disappeared. Its name refers to the Elam civilization, which existed in ancient times in the south of what is now Iran and was the rival of neighboring Mesopotamia.

In an interview with AFP, François Desset, who collaborates in a research department on ancient sciences at the University of Liège, in Belgium, explains that linear Elamite is the only "truly local" writing among all those which have been used in the long history of Iran.

“All the others – cuneiform, the Arabic alphabet or the Greek alphabet – were imported from the west,” says the 43-year-old archaeologist. And Persian, of Indo-European origin, today an official language in Iran, written with the Arabic alphabet, is "much closer to French than to the Elamite language", he assures.

For this former student at the Sorbonne in Paris, the adventure in Iran began in 2006, when he participated in excavations in the south of the country uncovering tablets written in linear Elamite.

Composed of 77 signs – in the shape of diamonds, curves and other geometric assemblies – this writing system was discovered in 1903 by a French mission exploring the archaeological site of Susa, in the south-west of present-day Iran.

But it resisted attempts at decipherment for decades, probably due to the very small number of known inscriptions, according to the researcher.

François Desset's frustration will last for another ten years after his "first physical encounter" in 2006 with the linear Elamite.

“Modern-day Champollion”

“There are lots of false leads, I can't find anything…” Until he was able to see with his own eyes, not just in photos, the old vases from the Mahboubian collection, named after an Iranian family exiled in London.

In 2015, thanks to these vases, "I was able to have access to ten new texts and the key to decipherment was in those", continues this "Champollion of modern times", as several media have nicknamed him.

A reference to the famous French decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs in the 1820s.

In Liège, François Desset works in association with an Egyptologist and a professor of Assyriology – expert in the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq. Their trio ensures that they constitute a unique center of excellence in the academic world in the three historical cradles of writing.

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“The key to deciphering a writing, as very often, are the proper names, of places, of gods, of kings,” he continues. "For Champollion, it was those of the Greek sovereigns, Ptolemy, Cleopatra... He spotted the signs which noted the names of these sovereigns. Me, my Ptolemy, is a sovereign called Shilhaha, he reigned around 1950 BC."

On a sequence of four signs, the orientalist notices that the last two are the same, a repetition which corresponds precisely to the end of the name "Shilhaha".

Today, François Desset says he has 45 inscriptions in linear Elamite, twice as many as twenty years ago.

The skill acquired for deciphering will perhaps allow him to go back in time from now on, and to study the tablets in “proto-Elamite” writing from an even earlier period. These are also kept at the Louvre Museum in Paris, with the fruit of discoveries from the first half of the 20th century.

In the midst of war in the Middle East, the academic, who lived in Iran from 2014 to 2020, says he is happy to be able to highlight Iran's rich heritage. “I hope that this work will have repercussions for Iranian culture and identity when times become good again.”

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With AFP

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