pottery known as Susa II; although it may be contemporary with Jemdet Nasr wares, its occurrence has unfortunately never been stratigraphically determined. It has recently been suggested that Susa II represents an intrusion of a peculiar phase of the late Iranian painted-pottery culture,[1] but nothing definite can be asserted at present.
We are doubly unfortunate in lacking a precise dating for the ware, since the earliest writing on clay tablets in Elam was contemporary with its manufacture.[2] In Mesopotamia clay tablets have been discovered in strata which belong to the Uruk period;[3] by the Jemdet Nasr period tablets with pictographic inscriptions show words and names that are indubitably Sumerian. The signs are no longer linear; and the primary numerical system, perhaps of these texts and certainly of the Sumerian, is sexagesimal.[4] Our Susa documents,[5] as well as those from central Iran,[6]
- ↑ H. Frankfort, Archeology and the Sumerian Problem (SAOC, No. 4 [1932]), pp. 65–72.
- ↑ De Mecquenem, Mém., XXV, 189–91 and 205.
- ↑ See now A. Nöldeke, E. Heinrich, and E. Schott, "Fünfter vorläufiger Bericht über die von der Notgemeinschaft der deutschen Wissenschaft in Uruk unternommenen Ausgrabungen," Abhandlungen der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, phil.-hist. Klasse, 1933, No. 5, esp. pp. 9 and 14.
- ↑ Langdon, Pictographic Inscriptions from Jemdet Nasr ("Oxford Editions of Cuneiform Texts," Vol. VII [Oxford, 1928]); cf. Meissner in AOF, VI (1930–31), 303 f.
- ↑ Scheil, Mém., VI, 59 ff., and Vol. XVII.
- ↑ Ghirshman, "Une tablette proto-élamite du plateau iranien," RA, XXXI (1934), 115–19.
