-1 101 Z The city of Susa began as a small village around 4000 BC. Pottery found here is a regional variation of Mesopotamia's late Ubaid ware. By around 3000 BC, the settlement had grown to about 15 hectares in size. Typical Uruk-style material shows that it was heavily influenced by adjacent Sumer.
# Early Susa
2 101 x This early cemetery, despite its compact area, contains the remains of at least 1,000 adults. The bodies may previously have been exposed in a charnel house (funerary chamber) and the collected bones buried in a mass grave. With them were buried pottery vessels and in some cases small objects of copper.
# Cemetery
3 101 x Writing was developing in Elam at the same time as in Sumer. Susa has yielded more than 1,400 tablets bearing texts in the Proto-Elamite script (the earliest known script of Elam), including a cache found here.
# Cache of tablets
4 101 x When Shulgi, of Sumer's Ur III dynasty, conquered Susa, he restored the temple of Ninhursag, goddess of Nature, on the acropolis, and built another temple beside it to Susa's patron god Inshushinak.
# Temples
5 101 x Bricks inscribed with the name of Naram-Sin and a statue of Manishtushu dedicated by Eshpum, the Elamite governor of Susa in his reign, attest the period of occupation of the city by the Mesopotamian dynasty of Agade, around 2269-2218 BC.
# Akkadian ruins
6 102 B A cache of tablets and an inscribed limestone relief written in the rare Linear Elamite script bear witness to the city's occupation by King Puzur-Inshushinak of neighbouring Awan around 2200 BC.
# Linear Elamite tablets, Limestone relief with Linear Elamite inscription
7 101 x A massive mudbrick platform, the Acropolis, was constructed over the remains of the first village, its facade decorated with pottery cylinders. Traces remain on its summit of storage rooms and probably temples. Statues of worshippers have been found here.
