Proto-Elamite in the Iranian Context.

I’m reading Kate Kelley’s Proto-Elamite: Writing and Society in Early Iran (see this post), and I thought this passage (pp. 15ff.) was of enough general interest to post: Throughout the twentieth century, the archaeology of early Iran has often been analysed through a filter of its western neighbour Mesopotamia (Petrie 2013; Alizadeh 2021). The invention of proto-Elamite and its spread across Iran are no exceptions, having been described as an echo of the cultural model of the Uruk Phenomenon, a ‘social experiment’ (Lamberg-Karlovsky 1989: x) which may have, like the model proposed for Uruk, involved administrators (from Susa?) establishing a presence at strategic locations with an eye to securing trade. The mid fourth-millennium connections just described remain a crucial piece of the puzzle, but this should be paired with research into regional developments in their own terms. The state of decipherment of proto-Elamite has made it difficult so far to dive broadly into differences in…