For more than a century, scholars stared at the same strange marks and got almost nowhere. The signs belonged to Linear Elamite, a 4,000-year-old writing system from ancient Iran. They appeared on ...

Over the past century, archaeologists have uncovered more than 1,600 Proto-Elamite inscriptions, but only about 43 in Linear Elamite, scattered widely across Iran. Illustration by Meilan Solly / ...

While a modern-day war has focused the world's attention on Iran, for French archaeologist François Desset it was a millennia-old mystery that drew him to the country. His quest: to decipher the 4,000 ...