Elam

The oldest state on the Iranian side of the Zagros, and the one the rest of Iran was built on top of: a Shimashki king took a Sumerian capital captive, Susa served as an administrative center for two thousand years before Cyrus, and the Achaemenids kept its language, its scribes and its clay.

The line below is a time axis. Position on it is date, so concurrency is visible: concurrent polities sit side by side rather than in sequence.

4 sourced edges run between this region and another, to Neo-Assyrian Empire, Achaemenid Empire, Kassite Dynasty of Babylon and Third Dynasty of Ur. Those are not drawn on this line — a thread that crossed regions would assert a sequence nobody cited — but they are on each polity’s own page.