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Elamite, also known as Hatamtite and formerly as Scythic, Median, Amardian, Anshanian and Susian, is an extinct language that was spoken by the ancient . It was recorded in what is now southwestern Iran from 2600 BC to 330 BC. Elamite is generally thought to have no demonstrable relatives and is usually considered a language isolate. The lack of established relatives makes its interpretation difficult.
A sizeable number of Elamite are known from the Achaemenid royal inscriptions – trilingual inscriptions of the Achaemenid Empire, in which Elamite was written using Elamite cuneiform (circa 5th century BC), which is fully deciphered. An important dictionary of the Elamite language, the Elamisches Wörterbuch was published in 1987 by W. Hinz and H. Koch. The Linear Elamite script however, one of the scripts used to write the Elamite language circa 2000 BC, has remained elusive until recently. in
Later, Elamite cuneiform, adapted from Akkadian cuneiform, was used from c. 2500 on. Elamite cuneiform was largely a syllabary of some 130 glyphs at any one time and retained only a few from Akkadian but, over time, the number of logograms increased. The complete corpus language of Elamite cuneiform consists of about 20,000 tablets and fragments. The majority belong to the Achaemenid era, and contain primarily economic records.
Middle Elamite is considered the “classical” period of Elamite. The best-attested variety is Achaemenid Elamite, which was widely used by the Achaemenid Empire for official inscriptions as well as administrative records and displays significant Old Persian influence.
Persepolis Administrative Archives were found at Persepolis in 1930s, and they are mostly in Elamite; the remains of more than 10,000 of these cuneiform documents have been uncovered. In comparison, Aramaic is represented by only 1,000 or so original records. Persepolis Fortification Archive. Oriental Institute – The University of Chicago These documents represent administrative activity and data flow in Persepolis over more than fifty consecutive years (509 to 457 BC).
Documents from the Old Elamite and early Neo-Elamite stages are relatively scarce. Neo-Elamite is a transitional form in its structure between Middle and Achaemenid Elamite.
The Elamite language may have remained in widespread use after the Achaemenid period. Several rulers of Elymais bore the Elamite name Kamnaskires in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC. The Acts of the Apostles (c. 80–90 AD) mentions the language as if it was still current. There are no later direct references, but Elamite may be the local language in which, according to the Talmud, the Book of Esther was recited annually to the Jews of Susa in the Sasanian Empire (224–642). Between the 8th and 13th centuries AD, various Arabic authors refer to a language called Khūzī or Khūz spoken in Khuzistan, which was unlike any other Iranian language known to those writers. It is possible that it was "a late variant of Elamite". in
The last original report on the Khūz language was written circa 988 by al-Maqdisi, characterizing the Khuzi as bilingual in Arabic and Persian but also speaking an "incomprehensible" language in Ramhormoz. The city had recently become prosperous again after the foundation of a market when it received an influx of foreigners and being a Khuzi was stigmatized at the time. The language probably died in the 11th century. Later authors only mention the language when citing previous work.
Its consonants included at least stops , and , sibilants , and (with an uncertain pronunciation), nasals and , liquids and and fricative , which was lost in late Neo-Elamite. Some peculiarities of the spelling have been interpreted as suggesting that there was a contrast between two series of stops (, , as opposed to , , ), but in general, such a distinction was not consistently indicated by written Elamite.
Elamite had at least the vowels , , and and may also have had , which was not generally expressed unambiguously.
Roots were generally CV, (C)VC, (C)VCV or, more rarely, CVCCV (the first C was usually a nasal).
The animate third-person suffix -r can serve as a nominalizing suffix and indicate nomen agentis or just members of a class. The inanimate third-person singular suffix -me forms abstracts.
Some examples of the use of the noun class suffixes above are the following:
Modifiers follow their (nominal) heads. In noun phrases and pronoun phrases, the suffixes referring to the head are appended to the modifier, regardless of whether the modifier is another noun (such as a possessor) or an adjective. Sometimes the suffix is preserved on the head as well:
This system, in which the noun class suffixes function as derivational morphemes as well as agreement markers and indirectly as subordinating morphemes, is best seen in Middle Elamite. It was, to a great extent, broken down in Achaemenid Elamite, where possession and, sometimes, attributive relationships are uniformly expressed with the “genitive case” suffix -na appended to the modifier: e.g. šak X-na “son of X”. The suffix -na, which probably originated from the inanimate agreement suffix -n followed by the nominalizing particle -a (see below), appeared already in Neo-Elamite.
The personal pronouns distinguish nominative and accusative case forms. They are as follows:
In general, no special possessive pronouns are needed in view of the construction with the noun class suffixes. Nevertheless, a set of separate third-person animate possessives -e (sing.) / appi-e (plur.) is occasionally used already in Middle Elamite: puhu-e “her children”, hiš-api-e “their name”. The relative pronouns are akka “who” and appa “what, which”.
The verb distinguishes three forms functioning as , known as “conjugations”. Conjugation I is the only one with special endings characteristic of finite verbs as such, as shown below. Its use is mostly associated with active voice, transitivity (or verbs of motion), neutral aspect and past tense meaning. Conjugations II and III can be regarded as periphrastic constructions with participles; they are formed by the addition of the nominal personal class suffixes to a passive perfective participle in -k and to an active imperfective participle in -n, respectively. Accordingly, conjugation II expresses a perfective aspect, hence usually past tense, and an intransitive or passive voice, whereas conjugation III expresses an imperfective non-past action.
The Middle Elamite conjugation I is formed with the following suffixes:
| + Conjugation I |
In Achaemenid Elamite, the loss of the /h/ reduces the transparency of the Conjugation I endings and leads to the merger of the singular and plural except in the first person; in addition, the first-person plural changes from -hu to -ut.
The participles can be exemplified as follows: perfective participle hutta-k “done”, kulla-k “something prayed”, i.e. “a prayer”; imperfective participle hutta-n “doing” or “who will do”, also serving as a non-past infinitive. The corresponding conjugations ( conjugation II and III) are:
In Achaemenid Elamite, the Conjugation 2 endings are somewhat changed:
| + Conjugation II |
There is also a periphrastic construction with an auxiliary verb ma- following either Conjugation II and III stems (i.e. the perfective and imperfective participles), or nomina agentis in -r, or a verb base directly. In Achaemenid Elamite, only the third option exists. There is no consensus on the exact meaning of the periphrastic forms with ma-, but durative, intensive or volitional interpretations have been suggested.
The optative is expressed by the addition of the suffix -ni to Conjugations I and II.
The imperative is identical to the second person of Conjugation I in Middle Elamite. In Achaemenid Elamite, it is the third person that coincides with the imperative.
The prohibitative is formed by the particle anu/ani preceding Conjugation III.
Verbal forms can be converted into the heads of subordinate clauses through the addition of the nominalising suffix -a, much as in Sumerian: siyan in-me kuši-hš(i)-me-a “the temple which they did not build”. -ti/ -ta can be suffixed to verbs, chiefly of conjugation I, expressing possibly a meaning of anteriority (perfect and pluperfect tense).
The negative particle is in-; it takes nominal class suffixes that agree with the subject of attention (which may or may not coincide with the grammatical subject): first-person singular in-ki, third-person singular animate in-ri, third-person singular inanimate in-ni/ in-me. In Achaemenid Elamite, the inanimate form in-ni has been generalized to all persons, and concord has been lost.
The language uses postpositions such as -ma "in" and -na "of", but spatial and temporal relationships are generally expressed in Middle Elamite by means of "directional words" originating as nouns or verbs. They can precede or follow the governed nouns and tend to exhibit noun class agreement with whatever noun is described by the prepositional phrase: i-r pat-r u-r ta-t-ni "may you place him under me", lit. "him inferior of-me place-you-may". In Achaemenid Elamite, postpositions become more common and partly displace that type of construction.
A common conjunction is ak "and, or". Achaemenid Elamite also uses a number of subordinating conjunctions such as anka "if, when" and sap "as, when". Subordinate clauses usually precede the verb of the main clause. In Middle Elamite, the most common way to construct a relative clause is to attach a nominal class suffix to the clause-final verb, optionally followed by the relativizing suffix -a: thus, lika-me i-r hani-š-r(i) "whose reign he loves", or optionally lika-me i-r hani-š-r-a. The alternative construction by means of the relative pronouns akka "who" and appa "which" is uncommon in Middle Elamite, but gradually becomes dominant at the expense of the nominal class suffix construction in Achaemenid Elamite.
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Achaemenid Elamite (Xerxes I, 486–465 BC; XPa):
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An Elamo-Dravidian family connecting Elamite with the Brahui language language of Pakistan and Dravidian languages of India was suggested in 1967 by Igor M. Diakonoff and later, in 1974, defended by David McAlpin and others. In 2012, Southworth proposed that Elamite forms the "Zagrosian family" along with Brahui language and, further down the cladogram, the remaining Dravidian languages; this family would have originated in Southwest Asia (southern Iran) and was widely distributed in South Asia and parts of eastern West Asia before the Indo-Aryan migration. Recent discoveries regarding early population migration based on ancient DNA analysis have revived interest in the possible connection between proto-Elamite and proto-Dravidian.: I admit that this reconstruction is somewhat farfetched. but so is a number of McAlpin's reconstructions. ... There is no obvious systematic relationship between the morphologies of Elamite and Dravidian, apparent at first sight. Only after a hypothetical reinterpretation, three morphological patterns emerge as cognate systems: the basic cases, the personal pronouns, and the appellative endings. ... I am also convinced that much additional work is to be done and many changes will be made to remove the genetic cognation in question from the realm of hypothesis and establish it as a fact acceptable to all.: Many of the rules formulated by McAlpin lack intrinsic phonetic/phonological motivation and appear ad hoc, invented to fit the proposed correspondences: e.g. Proto-Elamo-Dravidian *i, *e > Ø Elamite, when followed by t, n, which are again followed by a; but these remain undisturbed in Dravidian (1974: 93). How does a language develop that kind of sound change? This rule was dropped a few years later, because the etymologies were abandoned (see 1979: 184). ... We need more cognates of an atypical kind to rule out the possibility of chance. A critical reassessment of the Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis has been published by Filippo Pedron in 2023.
Václav Blažek proposed a relation with the Semitic languages.
In 2002 George Starostin published a lexicostatistic analysis finding Elamite to be approximately equidistant from Nostratic and Semitic.
None of these ideas have been accepted by mainstream historical linguists.
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