IELTS Reading 109: Cracking a Bronze Age Script

Adapted from National Geographic (Jan 2026). IELTS Reading Section 3 difficulty, approximately 1,050 words. Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/decoding-ancient-languages-linear-elamite

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Reading Passage

A. Neat rows of engraved symbols wrap around an ancient silver cup: asterisks, triangles with antenna-like appendages, hatched diamonds, lightning bolts. For more than a century, the people who study such things could look but not read them. The signs belong to Linear Elamite, a writing system that took root between 2700 and 2300 BC in the powerful kingdom of Elam, in what is now south-western Iran. The script endured for several hundred years before another writing system swept it aside and history forgot it. Just over a century ago, French archaeologists digging at the Elamite capital of Susa unearthed nineteen inscriptions in stone and clay. The long chains of signs plainly carried meaning, but to generations of philologists they remained mute. The reason was dispiritingly simple: the entire corpus amounted to only about forty inscriptions. Code-breakers thrive on repetition and pattern, and a tiny sample offers almost nothing to work with. Without dozens or hundreds of texts, there is no way to tell which recurring clusters mark royal names, which mark common words, and which are merely decorative. Every other major script of the ancient Near East — Egyptian hieroglyphs, Akkadian cuneiform — had survived in thousands of monuments, tax receipts and letters; Linear Elamite had been written down on too few objects, by too few hands, to surrender its secrets.

B. Into this impasse walked a French archaeologist, François Desset, whose curiosity turned into a twenty-year campaign. His first instinct was that he needed more raw material. Around 2004, he heard of the Mahboubian collection, a hoard of Near Eastern treasures that included ten silver vessels decorated with images and covered from rim to base in Linear Elamite signs. Experts had long questioned the objects' authenticity — the family could produce no documents proving where they had been dug up — but Desset persisted. In 2015, after a trusted British Museum curator made the introduction, he was finally allowed to inspect the cups in a private London home. Laid out before him were 759 engraved signs, more than doubling the known corpus. He photographed everything, fearing he might never see the artefacts again. Later metallurgical tests confirmed the silver was an alloy consistent with other vessels of the period, quietly defusing at least one objection.

C. What Desset lacked in volume he partly made up for with luck. Since 1903, the Louvre had held a limestone artefact called the Table au Lion, on which Elamite kings had inscribed their own script beside Akkadian cuneiform — a writing that scholars had already cracked in the 1850s. In 1905, a German linguist had noticed a four-sign sequence appearing twice in the Elamite text, matching a recurring four-sign pattern in the Akkadian names of a king and a god. From that parallel he had deduced the sounds of seven signs, and then progress had stalled for want of more text. Seated before his laptop one spring morning in 2017, Desset spotted a familiar four-sign pattern on one of the silver cups. The first sign was the one already known; the last two were identical. In a flash he recognised the duplicated sound as the ending of an early Elamite king's name, and minutes later, using a cuneiform reference to a likely father, he had fixed the values of five signs.

D. The breakthrough emboldened him to a bolder claim. He had begun by assuming, like everyone else, that Linear Elamite mixed sound-signs with picture-signs, as most early scripts do. But as his decipherment grew, he took what he calls a creative leap: the script, he concluded, was purely phonetic, consisting of 77 signs including five vowels. If correct, this would push the origin of a fully phonetic writing system back five hundred years, and shift its cradle from the Levant to the Iranian plateau. In 2022, with four colleagues, he announced that the sound of every Linear Elamite character had been worked out. It was a remarkable claim — the first such complete phonetic decipherment in decades. Yet the victory is only partial. To read a script you must know both how it sounds and what it means, and the underlying Elamite language has no known relative among living or dead tongues. Desset can sound out most of the signs but translate only a few words — king, people, son, a handful of titles.

E. Not everyone is persuaded. One of the world's foremost Mesopotamian scholars dismisses the purely phonetic reading as "certainly not correct" and suspects that picture-signs remain, calling much of the work "complete rubbish". The dispute is part of a wider, centuries-long effort in which new tools have not yet delivered what they promise. Artificial intelligence now helps locate lost sites, repair illegible texts and compare grammatical patterns, and it speeds up work on scripts already partly understood. But for scripts that record no known language — Linear A, the Indus script, Easter Island's Rongorongo — computers have so far failed to supply the creative insight that a bilingual text or a lucky pattern provides. The next quest, Desset says, is Proto-Elamite, an even older, four-hundred-to-eight-hundred-sign system that is, in his word, "a total mystery". For code-breakers, that is less an obstacle than an invitation. The broader lesson of the Linear Elamite story is that the hardest puzzles are cracked not by faster computers alone but by the luck of a bilingual text, the patience to inspect one private collection, and the willingness to make a bold bet that turns out, perhaps, to be only half right. A dozen scripts remain unread; each will yield, if it yields at all, to some combination of new artefacts, fresh comparison and a scholar stubborn enough to spend twenty years on a handful of engraved cups.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. A secret hoard — and a sceptical scholarly world ii. How a bilingual text and a repeated name unlocked the sounds iii. A bold claim: a purely phonetic script — but only half a victory iv. Critics, computers, and the next mystery v. Why the Elamite kingdom became a world power vi. The history of the Louvre Museum vii. How silver is alloyed with copper

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. Why did early scholars make so little progress on Linear Elamite? A. They could not read French. B. The total number of known inscriptions was tiny, offering little pattern to study. C. The tablets were made of gold. D. The script was written only on paper.

6. What did Desset gain from inspecting the Mahboubian silver cups? A. Enough money to fund his research. B. More than 759 new signs, roughly doubling the known corpus. C. A complete translation of the Elamite language. D. Permission to sell the artefacts.

7. How had the German linguist Bork first deduced some sound values in 1905? A. By comparing a repeated Elamite pattern with matching Akkadian royal and divine names. B. By using an artificial intelligence program. C. By guessing all the signs at random. D. By reading a modern Persian dictionary.

8. Why is Desset's decipherment described as "only partial"? A. He has not identified the sounds of the signs. B. He can sound out the script but understands the meaning of only a few words. C. He has refused to publish his findings. D. The silver cups were found to be forgeries.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. The Mahboubian silver cups were confirmed by metallurgical tests to be consistent with vessels of the period.
10. Desset believes Linear Elamite is a purely phonetic script with 77 signs.
11. Desset has produced a complete translation of the entire Elamite language.
12. Leading Oxford scholar Jacob Dahl fully supports Desset's decipherment.
13. Artificial intelligence has successfully deciphered the Indus script.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

The Table au Lion was inscribed with Linear Elamite alongside Akkadian (14) __________, a script already deciphered in the 1850s, which gave scholars a rare bilingual point of comparison. Desset's next target is (15) __________, an even older and largely mysterious system.

Answers & Explanations

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