Ancient Iran

Elam was one of the oldest named regions in history, one which was located in one of the oldest civilised areas in the world.

With a small but important selection of city states at its core it also provided history with one of its longest-surviving states, or at least a series of states which, for outsiders, can barely be distinguished apart from one another.

For a good deal of its early independent history - and certainly prior to the launch of the Achaemenid empire - Elam was much more a land of city states along the same lines as Sumer, and far less a unified state which implacably opposed Sumer.

The land of Elam was situated in what is now south-western Iran, on the east (left) bank of the Tigris and opposite modern Kuwait, Iraq's city of Basrah, and the northern part of the Persian Gulf. This area approximately covers the modern Khuzestan and Ilam provinces, the latter of which inherits the former region's name.

Even though it neighboured Sumer, it took some time to assimilate Sumer's groundbreaking social, agricultural, and administrative inventions (see 'related links' in the sidebar for 'The Sumerian Effect in Iran').

Elam's first city state kingdom arose by around 2700 BC, but little is known of its origins. Although geographically similar to southern Mesopotamia and not at all distant, Elam was located on an alluvial plain below the Zagros mountains rather than in the sandy dustbowl of Sumer which mainly clung to life along the two main rivers (its own alluvial plain).

Travel between the two regions could be difficult due to a string of large marshes which lay in the way. The nearest access route was in the Zagros foothills to circle the marshes, something which armies from both sides would later do with increasing frequency.

The city of Der and the Diyala river basin to the north-east of today's Baghdad were favoured access points for armies. This difficult access also meant difficulties in communication, which probably helps to explain at least part of Elam's comparatively late perceived climb towards civilisation.

Elamite cities on the plain to the east of Sumer benefited from direct contact, but cities with more easterly locations also swiftly caught up, connected into a network of trading routes which stretched east to the Indus and north to Hissar and the BMAC (click or tap on map to view at an intermediate size)

Only in the third millennium BC did the two regions begin to share visibly closer relations (notwithstanding the 'Priest-King of Uruk' phase in the mid-fourth millennium BC - see 'related links').

Cultural Elam

Elam achieved less than its advanced neighbours in terms of advanced cultural progression. It imported much of what it needed, including writing from Sumer and architecture from the later city and empire of Babylon.

From the few surviving records, it seems the Elamite language bore no relation to any others, whether Semitic, Sumerian or Indo-European. Instead it formed part of a pre-Indo-European group called Elamo-Dravidian which reached into India. It was a linguistic isolate which was later replaced by the Farsi of the Parsua.

Elamite records are also extremely sparse in recording local events, and large areas of its history are almost totally unknown except through Sumerian records. It is generally known in classical writings as Susiana, from the city state of Susa which usually (in much later years) formed its capital. Alexander the Great certainly used it as such.

Established around 7000 BC, about the same time as Susa, the city of Chogha Mish sat on the same alluvial plain in south-western Iran and was initially more advanced until the later fourth millennium BC at least

As a result of the local process of absorbing Sumer's advances and making them their own, an initial centralisation of power probably took place in the late fifth millennium BC at the site of Chogha Mish. In the early fourth millennium BC a new centre emerged, this time at Susa, located a hundred kilometres to the east of the Tigris. This went on to develop its own monumental architecture and, during the Uruk IV period in that millennium (see links), it thoroughly absorbed Sumer's material culture.

Cities and rivals

Elam's four major cities during the 'Early Dynastic' period in the early and middle third millennium BC were Awan, Anshan, Simash, and the 'mother city' of Susa which was also the Persian-era capital. Male rulers in these cities practised kingship by matrilineal descent, being referred to as 'son of a sister'.

Sometimes those cities had rival kingships, mostly poorly-recorded, and sometimes they seemed to combine into one kingdom or perhaps acted as a loosely-joined coalition. Sometimes they even attacked and/or invaded one another's territories.

Late 'Early Dynastic' Sumerian rulers, such as the king of Lagash, campaigned against the land of Elam and its various states. This was probably in competition for trade routes which reached overland towards the eastern Iran of the Jiroft and Helmand cultures and into the lands of the Indus Valley civilisation which lay at the eastern extent of this broad trading network.

Recent archaeology at the ancient site of Susa has confirmed traces of a village which was inhabited around 7000 BC, and painted pottery dating from about 5000 BC, along with previous finds at later levels which include carved cylinder seals, jewellery, clay balls, and clay tablets with cuneiform inscriptions which record business transactions, political history, and mathematical calculations

The BMAC civilisation along the Oxus in Central Asia was also part of this network, although its interaction with Elam remains obscure. The descendants of the Jiroft culture to Elam's immediate east quite possibly supplied the foundations of the Marhashi state.

Elamites did not disappear with the fall of Elam to a major Assyrian campaign of destruction in the seventh century BC. Instead its people survived as the Elymaeans as they became merged into the Achaemenid empire.

Main Sources

Gwendolyn Leick - Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City (Penguin Books, 2001)

Javier Álvarez-Mon, Gian Pietro Basello, & Yasmina Wick - The Elamite World (Eds, Routledge, 2018)

Marc van der Mieroop - History of the Ancient Near East c.3000-323 BC (Blackwell Publishing, 2004, 2007)

Additional Sources

Amélie Kuhrt - The Ancient Near East, c.3000-330 BC  (Routledge, 2000, Vol I & II)

Clemens Reichel - Political Change and Cultural Continuity in Eshnunna from the Ur III to the Old Babylonian Period (Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, 11 June 1996)

Enrico Ascalone - Mesopotamia: Assyrians, Sumerians, Babylonians (Dictionaries of Civilizations 1, University of California Press, 2007)

Jan Tavernier - Some Thoughts in Neo-Elamite Chronology

J N Postgate - Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History (Routledge, 1994)

John Heywood - Historical Atlas of the Ancient World, 4,000,000 to 500 BC (Barnes & Noble, 2000)

Michael Road - Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East (Facts on File, 2000)

Online Sources

Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature

Ancient World Magazine

Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary Project (published between 2003-2021, part of the Babylonian section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology)

Maps and text copyright © P L Kessler. An original feature for the History Files.