Jacob Dahl heads team to crack world's oldest undeciphered writing system

The international research project sees the collaboration of Wolfson's Ancient World Cluster with the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Louvre Museum in Paris, along with the University of Southampton, UCLA in California, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

Dr Jacob Dahl said: 'I have spent the last ten years trying to decipher the proto-Elamite writing system and, with this new technology, I think we are finally on the point of making a breakthrough'.

The breakthrough has been made possible by a new imaging device that has been used to provide the most detailed and high quality images ever taken of the elusive symbols cut into clay tablets. 

It's being used to help decode a writing system called proto-Elamite, used between around 3200BC and 2900BC in a region now in the south west of modern Iran.

Dr Dahl took the device to the Louvre Museum, which holds the most important collection of this writing, to create high-quality virtual images of the writings, which will be made publicly available online at the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, with the aim of using a kind of academic crowdsourcing to decipher the texts.

Dr Dahl said: 'The Louvre collection of early writing from Mesopotamia and Iran is incredibly important it contains the first substantial law code, the first record of a battle between kings, the first propaganda, and the first literature. Being able to put these documents online would be a great achievement.'

By viewing extremely high quality images of these documents, and by sharing them with a community of scholars worldwide, the Oxford University team hope to crack the code once and for all in a project that could, according to Dr Dahl, ‘transform fundamentally how we understand early writing'.

He said that making important documents from early human history publicly accessible is becoming increasingly important, both as a consequence of the ever-expanding influence of cyberscholarship in academic research, but also in many cases more pressingly as a matter of cultural heritage preservation in areas of the world threatened by armed conflict and collapse of security.

'Iraq's cultural heritage has been pillaged in the last 20 years, and the situation in neighbouring Syria is looking dire as well,' he said.

The writing system died out after only a couple centuries. Dr Dahl said: ‘The lack of a scholarly tradition meant that a lot of mistakes were made and the writing system may eventually have become useless as an administrative system. Eventually, the system was abandoned after some two hundred years.'

Dr Dahl joked: 'This is probably the world's first case of a collapse of knowledge because of the under-funding of education!'

The Ancient World Research Cluster is one of a number of research clusters at Wolfson that draw on the outstanding scholarly strengths within the College and provide inspiring spaces for innovative forms of interdisciplinary collaboration and thought.

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