Elamite is an extinct language, which was spoken by the ancient Elamites. Elamite was an official language of the Persian Empire from the sixth to 4th centuries BCE. A survive written records inside Elamite come out just about a period of the conquest of the Persian Empire by Alexander the Great.

Elamite scripts
All over a centuries, trey distinct Elamite scripts developed in turn.

Proto-Elamite is the oldest known Elamite script. These are foremost attested within 2900 BCE in Susa, the capital of Elam. A Proto-Elamite script is thought to use developed from either an early Sumerian script. A Proto-Elamite script consists of astir 1,000 signs & is thought to become part logographic. Since it has non eventually been deciphered, these are non known whether a language it is is Elamite or even a second language.

Old Elamite (Linear Elamite) occurs as syllabary derived from Proto-Elamite which was known to be utilized between astir 2250 and 2220 BCE, although it may keep close at hand been invented at an earliest date. Old Elamite has lone been partly deciphered, principally by Walther Hinz. Old Elamite consisted of astir Eighty symbols & was written inside vertical columns going from either top to bottom & left to correct.

The Elamite Cuneiform script was utilized from either astir 2500 BCE to 331 BCE, and was adapted from either a Akkadian Cuneiform. A Elamite Cuneiform script consisted of astir 130 symbols, far fewer than virtually all more cuneiform scripts.

Linguistic typology
Elamite was an agglutinative language, and Elamite grammar features case agreement between nouns, called Suffixaufnahme.

Relations to other language families
Elamite was non related the neighboring Semitic languages, or Indo-European languages, and although a select few call for Elamite a "sister" to the Sumerian language, the two languages pop up to exist as unrelated.

David McAlpin's Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis postulates a hereditary relation between Elamite & Dravidian languages, which then would keep close at hand been carried from either Elam to India by eastbound migration.

Extra recently, Sergei Starostin hwhen criticized the projected grammatical correspondences between Elamite & Dravidian as unlikely, & performs the mass lexical comparison of Elamite to the Nostratic macrofamily (which includes Dravidian) when well as Afroasiatic and Sino-Caucasian, concluding that Elamite (unlike ) is distantly related to tons trine, however doesn't have a particularly close relationship by owning Dravidian. [http://starling.rinet.ru/Texts/elam.pdf]

Reference
Khačikjan, Margaret: A Elamite Language, Documenta Asiana IV, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Istituto by the gli Studi Micenei ed Egeo-Anatolici, 1998 ISBN 8887345015

Potts, Daniel T.: A archeology of Elam: formation & transformation of an ancient Iranian state, Cambridge U., 1999 ISBN 0521564964 & ISBN 0521563585

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