Elam was a Mesopotamian label for many highland peoples
Elam occupied lowlands and highlands of what is now western Iran and bits of southern Iraq. Writing appears around 3000 BC beside Sumer. Scholar Daniel Potts argues the name itself is mostly a Mesopotamian umbrella, not how locals said who they were.
The Elamites called their land Haltamti, or Hatamti in Linear Elamite; Elam is the Sumerian rendering, and in Sumerian the word also meant the highlands. The later province name Khuzestan descends from Old Persian hūja, meaning Susa or Elam. Ancient writers could not agree on the map: Ptolemy was the first to speak of Susiana, the country around Susa, while Strabo treated highland Elam and lowland Susiana as separate regions, and Jewish sources waver between the two readings.
Modern scholars inherited the muddle. Once the importance of ancient Anshan was recognised, some argued that the heart of Elam lay in those highlands rather than at lowland Susa. Daniel Potts counters that highland peoples saw themselves as Anshanites, Awanites, Shimashkians and the like, and that the single word Elam was an outsider's convenience. Much of what is known comes from Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian and Babylonian texts, so the picture remains patchy.
Susa itself was founded around 4000 BC beside the Karun river, and its earliest pottery has no Mesopotamian match. The proto-Elamite phase, about 3200 to 2700 BC, saw a distinct script in use at Susa and the merging of states including Anshan, Awan and Shimashki. Luristan developed a bronze-working tradition with Elamite ties by the mid-3rd millennium BC.
The Old Elamite period opened around 2700 BC with a conquest by Enmebaragesi of Kish. A king list from Susa names twelve rulers each for the Awan and Simashki dynasties. Sargon of Akkad beat the Awan king Luh-ishan, took Susa and tried to impose Akkadian as its official tongue, since Mesopotamians coveted the plateau's timber, stone and metal. Roughly a century later Shulgi of the Neo-Sumerian Empire seized Susa again. Later phases ran to about 1100 BC under the Middle Elamites and to 540 BC under the Neo-Elamites, before Achaemenid Persia began in 539 BC.
Source: Elam
