Elam

The best-preserved ziggurat on earth is not at Ur, and not anywhere in Mesopotamia. It stands above the Dez river in southwestern Iran, at a site called Chogha Zanbil, inside a triple ring of walls laid out around 1250 BC. Its builder, a king named Untash-Napirisha, planned an entire sacred city around it: temples to a dozen gods, vaulted royal tombs, a water system fed by a canal dug across some fifty kilometres of plain. And running through the mass of the building, roughly every tenth course, his masons set bricks stamped with his name and dedication, so that the structure repeats its maker all the way through its fabric. You could quarry the ziggurat down to rubble and still be reading who built it.

Then the king died, and the project simply stopped. The city was never finished and never fully occupied; later rulers carried some of its furnishings back to Susa and let the rest stand. What survives is a paradox: the greatest intact example of the ancient Near East's signature building type, preserved precisely because it was walked away from — and raised by a civilisation most people cannot name.

That civilisation was Elam. For roughly three thousand years — longer than Sumer, Akkad, Babylon or Assyria lasted — it was the neighbour, trading partner, in-law and enemy of every power on the Mesopotamian plain. This book is its history.

The reason Elam lasted that long is written into its map, and the map is where the book begins. Elam was two countries under one crown: a hot river plain around Susa, close kin to Mesopotamia in look and habit, and a highland world around Anshan, up in the Zagros, which was nothing like Mesopotamia at all. Armies from the plain could take Susa — and did, repeatedly — and each time discovered they had conquered half a kingdom. The court withdrew into mountains where no lowland army could feed itself or hold ground, and waited. Hammurabi declared victory over Elam. So did Nebuchadnezzar I. So, most thunderously, did Ashurbanipal of Assyria, who claimed to have silenced the land forever. Each was writing an obituary for something that went on to outlive his own civilisation.

The difficulty — and the reason Elam fell out of memory — is that nearly everything the ancient world wrote about it was written by people at war with it. Elam enters the record as the destroyer in Sumerian poetry, the plunderer in Babylonian chronicles, the stubborn enemy in Assyrian annals. Its own testimony survives thinly, on bricks and stelae and a single early treaty, in a language related to nothing else that can be demonstrated. This book works both sides of that ledger: hostile testimony is read as hostile, royal boasting is weighed against the archaeology, and the gaps are shown rather than smoothed over.

And the story does not end where the kingdom does. When Elam finally lost its independence, its conquerors turned out to be its heirs. The dynasty that built the Persian Empire came out of Anshan, Elam's highland half; Cyrus the Great styled himself with an Elamite royal title; Darius put an Elamite version on his cliff inscription at Behistun. At Persepolis, the daily paperwork of the largest empire the world had yet seen was drafted in Elamite by scribes of the old tradition, generations after the last Elamite king was gone. The most famous empire of the ancient world ran, at the clerical level, on the machinery of the most forgotten one.

Why I Wrote This

I kept meeting Elam in the margins of other books. Write enough about Sumer, Babylon and Assyria and it turns up constantly — sacking Ur, sheltering Babylonian rebels, absorbing Assyrian invasions — always as the trouble from the east, never with a shelf of its own. Three thousand years of Mesopotamian history has a permanent second party, and the histories are written almost entirely from one side of it. The single standard survey of Elam is an academic volume priced for university libraries; below that there is essentially nothing in English. So I wrote the book I wanted to buy: a straight narrative connecting the stele in the Louvre, the ziggurat at Chogha Zanbil and the Persepolis archive to the one civilisation that links them, honest at every step about what a fragmentary record can and cannot carry.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to know Mesopotamian history before reading this?

No. Sumer, Akkad, Babylon and Assyria are each introduced as they enter the story, with the context needed to follow them. If you already know that history, this is the other side of it.

Can anyone actually read the Elamite language?

It depends which script you mean. Elamite written in cuneiform can be read — imperfectly, since the language is an isolate with no known relatives to lean on, but genuinely read, from royal bricks down to Persepolis ration records. Linear Elamite, an older native script, has seen recent decipherment proposals the book treats as promising but not settled. Proto-Elamite, the oldest of the three, remains undeciphered: its numbers and commodities are legible as bookkeeping, its language is not.

Why is the Code of Hammurabi in Paris instead of Iraq?

Because it spent five centuries in Susa before it spent any time in a museum. An Elamite king, Shutruk-Nahhunte, carried it off from Babylonia around 1158 BC along with six centuries of Mesopotamian royal art; it was buried when Susa was destroyed in 646 BC, excavated in three pieces by a French mission under Jacques de Morgan in the winter of 1901–02, and has been displayed in the Louvre since 1902.

Is Elam the same thing as ancient Persia?

No — Elam existed for well over two thousand years before any Persian dynasty did. But the relationship is one of the book's central arguments: Persia rose in Anshan, Elam's highland half, made Susa an imperial capital, and staffed its administration with Elamite-trained scribes. Persia is Elam's successor and beneficiary, not another name for it.

How long is the book?

About 74,000 words — roughly 257 pages in print. Fourteen chapters, an introduction and conclusion, and three reference appendices.

If You Liked This, You Might Like

• Babylon: The City That Wrote the Rules of Civilization — Hammurabi's own city, seen from the inside; this book is the view from the power that emptied it of its monuments.
• Assyria: The World's First Empire of Terror — the war machine that finally destroyed Susa, and whose annals supply so much of Elam's hostile press.
• The Persian Empire: The World's First Superstate — the empire that inherited Elam's capital, scribes and chancery language; it begins almost exactly where this book ends.

For the whole span of recorded Mesopotamian history, every king on the plain lay awake over the same eastern neighbour. This is the biography of the thing they were right to worry about.