Yusupov's House - Recent changes [en-gb]

Dozenal Primer Inscription

Mvuijlst — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 18:03:42 GMT

TWELVE: the simplex form C01-M03-T02-C04 is attested once, in the numeral list (clause 15); the sums write twelve as one dozen

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	\| <code>C01-S03-C03-T03-C01-M02-H02-B04</code>		\| <code>C01-S03-C03-T03-C01-M02-H02-B04</code>
	\| [[File:C01.svg\|20px\|alt=C01\|link=]][[File:S03.svg\|20px\|alt=S03\|link=]][[File:C03.svg\|20px\|alt=C03\|link=]][[File:T03.svg\|20px\|alt=T03\|link=]][[File:C01.svg\|20px\|alt=C01\|link=]][[File:M02.svg\|20px\|alt=M02\|link=]][[File:H02.svg\|20px\|alt=H02\|link=]][[File:B04.svg\|20px\|alt=B04\|link=]]		\| [[File:C01.svg\|20px\|alt=C01\|link=]][[File:S03.svg\|20px\|alt=S03\|link=]][[File:C03.svg\|20px\|alt=C03\|link=]][[File:T03.svg\|20px\|alt=T03\|link=]][[File:C01.svg\|20px\|alt=C01\|link=]][[File:M02.svg\|20px\|alt=M02\|link=]][[File:H02.svg\|20px\|alt=H02\|link=]][[File:B04.svg\|20px\|alt=B04\|link=]]
	\| Transparently ONE followed by the ×12 derivational bundle; ~~no simplex sign sequence for~~ twelve ~~is attested in the inscription~~. Target of the complement sums 11+1, 10+2 and 6+6. <ref name="Rubergskier2024" />		\| Transparently ONE followed by the ×12 derivational bundle; the sums always write twelve this way. Target of the complement sums 11+1, 10+2 and 6+6. <ref name="Rubergskier2024" />
			\|-
			\| TWELVE (simplex)
			\| <code>C01-M03-T02-C04</code>
			\| [[File:C01.svg\|20px\|alt=C01\|link=]][[File:M03.svg\|20px\|alt=M03\|link=]][[File:T02.svg\|20px\|alt=T02\|link=]][[File:C04.svg\|20px\|alt=C04\|link=]]
			\| Attested once, as the last item of the numeral list in the second line (clauses 3–15), which gives ZERO to ELEVEN as one-word clauses and then this form; read as twelve from its position. The sums never use it, and Rubergskier's analysis does not discuss the list. Glossed TWELVE in the dictionary published with Üksküla's Zagi materials. <ref name="Ukskula2024">Inrik Üksküla, “The Clan of Zagi: Numeric Calculus or Genealogical Primer? A Structural Analysis of the Kristiansen Cuneiform Corpus,” preprint (2024), with downloadable analysis materials.</ref>
	\|-		\|-
	\| '''EQUALS / clause spine'''		\| '''EQUALS / clause spine'''

Nordland Itinerary

Mvuijlst — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 11:02:22 GMT

Name Klema: origin in Nordland Itinerary line 58 (Weidner 1939 addendum), located by Roelandt in 2024; Hittite-type misnomer

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	Line 58 is the only place in the text where a foreign word is written out rather than described. The three signs 𒆠𒇷𒈠 can be read ''ki-li-ma'' or ''ke4-le-ma''. Sumerian orthography cannot write two consonants at the beginning of a word, and foreign names with initial clusters are regularly broken up with a vowel in cuneiform, so a form with a cluster, ''klema'' or ''klima'', is at least as likely as the four-syllable one. What the scribe was told the word meant is given in the next line, “the living tongue”.		Line 58 is the only place in the text where a foreign word is written out rather than described. The three signs 𒆠𒇷𒈠 can be read ''ki-li-ma'' or ''ke4-le-ma''. Sumerian orthography cannot write two consonants at the beginning of a word, and foreign names with initial clusters are regularly broken up with a vowel in cuneiform, so a form with a cluster, ''klema'' or ''klima'', is at least as likely as the four-syllable one. What the scribe was told the word meant is given in the next line, “the living tongue”.

	Weidner treated the name as a curiosity. It acquired a second life in the ~~2020s~~, ~~when~~ writers on the [[Kristiansen coding system\|Kristiansen corpus]] ~~began to use~~ “Klema” for the sign system and the language presumed to lie behind it, on the strength of geography alone: the itinerary places a language so called in the forest zone north of the Caspian around 2100 BC, and the [[Yedoma Ledger]], the only physical object proposed as a carrier of the corpus, comes from the north Eurasian permafrost. The blog ''[[Klema Field Notes]]'' carries the name in its title. No published study has argued that the people the expedition met were the people who wrote the corpus, and the tablets themselves say the tongue was unwritten.		Weidner treated the name as a curiosity. It acquired a second life in 2024, when [[Marie Roelandt]], who had located the addendum, named her blog after it, and writers on the [[Kristiansen coding system\|Kristiansen corpus]] followed, using “Klema” for the sign system and the language presumed to lie behind it on the strength of geography alone: the itinerary places a language so called in the forest zone north of the Caspian around 2100 BC, and the [[Yedoma Ledger]], the only physical object proposed as a carrier of the corpus, comes from the north Eurasian permafrost. The blog ''[[Klema Field Notes]]'' carries the name in its title. No published study has argued that the people the expedition met were the people who wrote the corpus, and the tablets themselves say the tongue was unwritten.

	The name is therefore a misnomer of a familiar kind. Hittite is named after the land of Hatti and its biblical inhabitants, while the speakers of the language called it ''nešili'', after the city of Neša; the label stuck because it was the first one available, and philology has lived with it. “Klema” names a language by the word a Sumerian scribe heard from a forest people who may or may not have been its speakers, and applies it to a script that no Sumerian ever saw. Its users accept this. Roelandt has written that it may be “the wrong name for the wrong script”, and that it is nevertheless “a better name than ‘the Kristiansen corpus’”.		The name is therefore a misnomer of a familiar kind. Hittite is named after the land of Hatti and its biblical inhabitants, while the speakers of the language called it ''nešili'', after the city of Neša; the label stuck because it was the first one available, and philology has lived with it. “Klema” names a language by the word a Sumerian scribe heard from a forest people who may or may not have been its speakers, and applies it to a script that no Sumerian ever saw. Its users accept this. Roelandt has written that it may be “the wrong name for the wrong script”, and that it is nevertheless “a better name than ‘the Kristiansen corpus’”.

	== Publication and reception ==		== Publication and reception ==
	The 1938 article appeared in April and was illustrated with a single pen drawing of a caravan descending into a snowy steppe. It gives the tablet's physical description but not its museum number or present whereabouts, and no photograph or hand copy of the tablet was included. The addendum of 1939, a few pages in a late issue of the same series, supplied the transliteration and translation of the remaining lines and the colophon, again without a copy or photograph. Published on the eve of the war in a small print run, it was not cited for decades, and the remainder of the text was widely believed to be unedited until the ~~addendum was identified~~ in ~~2026~~.<ref name="Weidner1939" />		The 1938 article appeared in April and was illustrated with a single pen drawing of a caravan descending into a snowy steppe. It gives the tablet's physical description but not its museum number or present whereabouts, and no photograph or hand copy of the tablet was included. The addendum of 1939, a few pages in a late issue of the same series, supplied the transliteration and translation of the remaining lines and the colophon, again without a copy or photograph. Published on the eve of the war in a small print run, it was not cited for decades, and the remainder of the text was widely believed to be unedited until [[Marie Roelandt]] located a copy in early 2024 while searching the older literature for Mesopotamian contacts with the north Eurasian forest zone. She took the name in line 58 for her blog, and the corpus literature took the word from there.<ref name="Weidner1939" />

	The itinerary is cited in discussion of the [[Kristiansen coding system\|Kristiansen corpus]] for two reasons. It is the earliest text placing a literate Mesopotamian expedition in the north Eurasian forest zone, the broad region from which the [[Yedoma Ledger]] was later recovered, and it carries the name that the corpus has come to bear. Nothing in either publication mentions inscribed bone or ivory or any encounter with a script; the one statement about writing in the text is the scribe's own, that the tongue he heard was unwritten. No direct connection between the itinerary and the corpus has been proposed in print.		The itinerary is cited in discussion of the [[Kristiansen coding system\|Kristiansen corpus]] for two reasons. It is the earliest text placing a literate Mesopotamian expedition in the north Eurasian forest zone, the broad region from which the [[Yedoma Ledger]] was later recovered, and it carries the name that the corpus has come to bear. Nothing in either publication mentions inscribed bone or ivory or any encounter with a script; the one statement about writing in the text is the scribe's own, that the tongue he heard was unwritten. No direct connection between the itinerary and the corpus has been proposed in print.

Marie Roelandt

Mvuijlst — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 11:02:21 GMT

Name Klema: origin in Nordland Itinerary line 58 (Weidner 1939 addendum), located by Roelandt in 2024; Hittite-type misnomer

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	'''Marie Roelandt''' (born 1967) is a Belgian independent researcher ~~and~~ the author of the blog ''[[Klema Field Notes]]'' (klema.tsuk.org). She lives in Antwerp. She trained as a librarian and worked for many years in archival document management, developing alongside this a longstanding amateur interest in historical linguistics, genealogy, and cryptography. She has no formal academic affiliation and describes herself on her blog as "a librarian who reads too many preprints."		'''Marie Roelandt''' (born 1967) is a Belgian independent researcher, the author of the blog ''[[Klema Field Notes]]'' (klema.tsuk.org), and the person who introduced the name '''Klema''' for the [[Kristiansen coding system\|Kristiansen corpus]]. She lives in Antwerp. She trained as a librarian and worked for many years in archival document management, developing alongside this a longstanding amateur interest in historical linguistics, genealogy, and cryptography. She has no formal academic affiliation and describes herself on her blog as "a librarian who reads too many preprints."

	Roelandt began following the [[Kristiansen corpus]] literature after encountering [[Ginevra Rubergskier\|Rubergskier]]'s 2024 paper through a popular-science digest. Her distinctive contribution has been to bring genealogical intuitions, developed through decades of family history research, to bear on [[Inrik Üksküla\|Üksküla]]'s structural analysis of the [[Zagi Tablets]].		Roelandt began following the [[Kristiansen corpus]] literature after encountering [[Ginevra Rubergskier\|Rubergskier]]'s 2024 paper through a popular-science digest. Her distinctive contribution has been to bring genealogical intuitions, developed through decades of family history research, to bear on [[Inrik Üksküla\|Üksküla]]'s structural analysis of the [[Zagi Tablets]].
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	In a follow-up post, "Who's who in the Zagi family?" (''[[Klema Field Notes]]'', 12 April 2024), Roelandt constructed a working transliteration of the corpus. This was explicitly not a phonetic proposal but a readability aid, assigning arbitrary Latin letters to sign types in rough frequency order. Using it, she reconstructed a multi-generational family tree spanning at least three generations, identified two gendered variants of both CHILD and PARENT alongside a gender-neutral form of each, and identified a possessive particle. She noted two probable scribal slips in Document 3 in which the copy appears to have misattributed a grandchild relationship as a child relationship, and she stopped short of proposing readings for the opening and closing sentences of the corpus, which she described as "tempting but beyond what the internal evidence can support."		In a follow-up post, "Who's who in the Zagi family?" (''[[Klema Field Notes]]'', 12 April 2024), Roelandt constructed a working transliteration of the corpus. This was explicitly not a phonetic proposal but a readability aid, assigning arbitrary Latin letters to sign types in rough frequency order. Using it, she reconstructed a multi-generational family tree spanning at least three generations, identified two gendered variants of both CHILD and PARENT alongside a gender-neutral form of each, and identified a possessive particle. She noted two probable scribal slips in Document 3 in which the copy appears to have misattributed a grandchild relationship as a child relationship, and she stopped short of proposing readings for the opening and closing sentences of the corpus, which she described as "tempting but beyond what the internal evidence can support."

			Roelandt is also the source of the name Klema. In February 2024, before her first post, she went through the older Assyriological literature looking for any Mesopotamian text that placed a literate party in the north Eurasian forest zone, the region the [[Yedoma Ledger]] had come out of, and found Weidner's 1938 article on the [[Nordland Itinerary]] together with his short 1939 addendum, which had not been cited since the war. The addendum contains the line in which the people at “the head of the lands” name their own tongue, ''ki-li-ma'', “the living tongue”. She took the word for her blog and mentioned its source only on the About page, where she calls it “the wrong name for the wrong script” and “a better name than ‘the Kristiansen corpus’”. The word passed from the blog into informal use in the field. She has said that she expected to be corrected and was surprised to be followed.

	Roelandt's CHILD reading has been informally cited by several researchers as a significant clarification of Üksküla's Hypothesis B, though it has not yet appeared in peer-reviewed literature. She has said she has no plans to submit for publication, preferring the blog format for its speed and its tolerance of openly provisional conclusions.		Roelandt's CHILD reading has been informally cited by several researchers as a significant clarification of Üksküla's Hypothesis B, though it has not yet appeared in peer-reviewed literature. She has said she has no plans to submit for publication, preferring the blog format for its speed and its tolerance of openly provisional conclusions.

Klema Field Notes

Mvuijlst — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 11:02:20 GMT

Name Klema: origin in Nordland Itinerary line 58 (Weidner 1939 addendum), located by Roelandt in 2024; Hittite-type misnomer

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	'''''Klema Field Notes''''' is an independent research blog maintained by [[Marie Roelandt]] and hosted at [https://klema.tsuk.org/ klema.tsuk.org]. It publishes informal but closely argued analyses of material in the [[Kristiansen coding system]], with a particular focus on the [[Zagi Tablets]].		'''''Klema Field Notes''''' is an independent research blog maintained by [[Marie Roelandt]] and hosted at [https://klema.tsuk.org/ klema.tsuk.org]. It publishes informal but closely argued analyses of material in the [[Kristiansen coding system]], with a particular focus on the [[Zagi Tablets]].

			== Name ==
			The blog is named after ''ki-li-ma'', the word that line 58 of the [[Nordland Itinerary]] gives as the name the people at “the head of the lands” used for their own tongue. The line belongs to the part of the text that H. Weidner published in a short addendum of 1939, which was overlooked for decades; Roelandt located a copy in early 2024, while searching the older Assyriological literature for any Mesopotamian contact with the north Eurasian forest zone, and adopted the word before her first post. She recorded the source only on the blog's About page, where she also concedes that it may be “the wrong name for the wrong script” and calls it “a better name than ‘the Kristiansen corpus’”. From the blog the word passed into general use for the [[Kristiansen coding system\|corpus]] and the language presumed behind it.

	== Notable posts ==		== Notable posts ==
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	== Relation to academic literature ==		== Relation to academic literature ==
	''Klema Field Notes'' explicitly engages with and cites [[Inrik Üksküla]]'s preprint and [[Ginevra Rubergskier]]'s [[Language Codes\|''Language Codes'']] paper. Roelandt's CHILD reading may be seen as a development of Üksküla's Hypothesis B.		''Klema Field Notes'' explicitly engages with and cites [[Inrik Üksküla]]'s preprint and [[Ginevra Rubergskier]]'s [[Language Codes\|''Language Codes'']] paper. Roelandt's CHILD reading may be seen as a development of Üksküla's Hypothesis B. The name Klema, which the corpus literature now uses informally, is likewise hers; see [[#Name\|above]].

	== See also ==		== See also ==

Kristiansen coding system

Mvuijlst — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 11:02:19 GMT

Name Klema: origin in Nordland Itinerary line 58 (Weidner 1939 addendum), located by Roelandt in 2024; Hittite-type misnomer

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	The '''Kristiansen coding system''' is the alphanumeric notation used in the scholarly literature to transcribe the geometric signs of the [[Scapula Glyph Inscription]] and the other texts that share its sign repertory, collectively referred to as the '''Kristiansen corpus'''. Each sign receives a family letter and a two-digit index (for example C01, B04, P01). The system was introduced by [[Jan-Tage Kristiansen]] in a 2023 correspondence note and has since been adopted without modification by every subsequent study.<ref name="Kristiansen2023h">Jan-Tage Kristiansen, “Twin renderings, single template: a ruled signary on a putative cervid scapula,” correspondence note, ''language'' 27 (October 2023): 1073–1074.</ref>		The '''Kristiansen coding system''' is the alphanumeric notation used in the scholarly literature to transcribe the geometric signs of the [[Scapula Glyph Inscription]] and the other texts that share its sign repertory, collectively referred to as the '''Kristiansen corpus''' and, since 2024, also as '''Klema''', a name borrowed from the [[Nordland Itinerary]] (see [[#Name\|Name]] below). Each sign receives a family letter and a two-digit index (for example C01, B04, P01). The system was introduced by [[Jan-Tage Kristiansen]] in a 2023 correspondence note and has since been adopted without modification by every subsequent study.<ref name="Kristiansen2023h">Jan-Tage Kristiansen, “Twin renderings, single template: a ruled signary on a putative cervid scapula,” correspondence note, ''language'' 27 (October 2023): 1073–1074.</ref>

	The codes are deliberately neutral. They record what a sign looks like and how it is built, not what it might mean or sound like. No phonetic values have been proposed in the literature, and the mnemonic names attached to the codes (BOX-DOT, TEE-LEFT, and so on) are descriptive labels only.		The codes are deliberately neutral. They record what a sign looks like and how it is built, not what it might mean or sound like. No phonetic values have been proposed in the literature, and the mnemonic names attached to the codes (BOX-DOT, TEE-LEFT, and so on) are descriptive labels only.
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	Critics note that the neutrality is also a limitation: the codes freeze Kristiansen's initial segmentation of the signs, and any sign he merged or split in 2023 is merged or split in every later study. Kristiansen himself has issued only minor corrections since, describing his role as “keeping the inventory honest.”		Critics note that the neutrality is also a limitation: the codes freeze Kristiansen's initial segmentation of the signs, and any sign he merged or split in 2023 is merged or split in every later study. Kristiansen himself has issued only minor corrections since, describing his role as “keeping the inventory honest.”

			== Name ==
			“Kristiansen corpus” and “Kristiansen coding system” are descriptive conveniences, like “Dozenal Primer Inscription” and “Zagi Tablets”; none is a claim about what the writers called anything. The word '''Klema''' entered the field in 2024 from outside it. Line 58 of the [[Nordland Itinerary]], in the part of that text edited in Weidner's overlooked 1939 addendum, records what the people at “the head of the lands” called their tongue: ''ki-li-ma'', glossed by the scribe's interpreter as “the living tongue”. [[Marie Roelandt]], who had located the addendum, named her blog ''[[Klema Field Notes]]'' after it in March 2024, and the word spread from the blog into informal usage for the sign system and the language presumed to lie behind it, on the strength of geography alone: the itinerary places a language so called in the forest zone north of the Caspian around 2100 BC, and the [[Yedoma Ledger]] comes from the north Eurasian permafrost.

			Users of the name generally acknowledge that it is a misnomer of the Hittite type. Nothing connects the people the Sumerian expedition met with the people who wrote the corpus, the itinerary itself says the tongue it heard was unwritten, and the cuneiform spelling breaks up a word that may have begun with a consonant cluster. Kristiansen has declined to use it, on the ground that a name is a hypothesis. Rubergskier and Üksküla use it in correspondence and not in print. It has nevertheless become the ordinary short name, and this encyclopedia follows that usage where no more precise term is needed.

	== See also ==		== See also ==

Nordland Itinerary

Mvuijlst — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 10:57:49 GMT

Add Weidner's 1939 addendum: lines 46-67 and colophon, the name ki-li-ma (Klema), Hittite-type misnomer section

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	The '''Nordland Itinerary''' (German ''Reisebericht ins Nordland'') is the conventional name for a Sumerian travel account preserved on an Old Babylonian school tablet and published in 1938 by H. Weidner as “Ein neusumerischer Reisebericht ins Nordland” in the ''Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft zu Leipzig''.<ref name="Weidner1938">H. Weidner, “Ein neusumerischer Reisebericht ins Nordland,” ''Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft zu Leipzig'' 27 (April 1938).</ref> It records the stages of a royal expedition that left northern Mesopotamia, crossed the Zagros and the Iranian plateau, reached the southern shore of the Caspian and continued through the steppe corridor towards the Urals, and it is the only cuneiform text that describes snow, a frozen river and the northern lights.		The '''Nordland Itinerary''' (German ''Reisebericht ins Nordland'') is the conventional name for a Sumerian travel account preserved on an Old Babylonian school tablet and published in 1938 by H. Weidner as “Ein neusumerischer Reisebericht ins Nordland” in the ''Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft zu Leipzig''.<ref name="Weidner1938">H. Weidner, “Ein neusumerischer Reisebericht ins Nordland,” ''Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft zu Leipzig'' 27 (April 1938).</ref> It records the stages of a royal expedition that left northern Mesopotamia, crossed the Zagros and the Iranian plateau, reached the southern shore of the Caspian and continued through the steppe corridor towards the Urals, and it is the only cuneiform text that describes snow, a frozen river and the northern lights.

	Weidner assigned the composition to the Ur III period, around 2100 BC, and treated the surviving tablet as a later copy made for teaching. ~~Only one section of the text,~~ some thirty lines from the third and fourth columns, was ~~published in transliteration and translation~~; the ~~remainder has not been edited~~.		Weidner assigned the composition to the Ur III period, around 2100 BC, and treated the surviving tablet as a later copy made for teaching. His 1938 article published some thirty lines from the third and fourth columns. The remaining lines of the fourth column, with the colophon, appeared a year later in a short addendum that was long overlooked;<ref name="Weidner1939">H. Weidner, “Nachtrag zum neusumerischen Reisebericht ins Nordland,” ''Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft zu Leipzig'' 29 (1939).</ref> they contain the only foreign language name recorded by a Mesopotamian source north of the Caspian, ''ki-li-ma'', from which the modern term [[Kristiansen coding system\|Klema]] is taken.

	== The tablet ==		== The tablet ==
	The text survives on a medium-sized four-column tablet of light brown clay. Palaeographically the hand is Old Babylonian. A colophon on the lower edge of the reverse, partly preserved, gives the total number of travelling days~~; on~~ Weidner~~'s reconstruction~~ the ~~whole undertaking lasted~~ a little over six months.<ref name="Weidner1938" />		The text survives on a medium-sized four-column tablet of light brown clay. Palaeographically the hand is Old Babylonian. A colophon on the lower edge of the reverse, partly preserved, gives the total number of travelling days. In 1938 Weidner read the surviving figure as a little over six months; the addendum, which gives the line in full, shows the numeral broken at its left edge, and “[1]6 months and 12 days” is now the accepted reading, which suits a journey whose snowfall comes in the seventh month.<ref name="Weidner1938" /><ref name="Weidner1939" />

	Weidner argued that the composition itself is older than its copy on three grounds: the text is written consistently in Sumerian rather than in Akkadian with Sumerian glosses; its vocabulary and style match the elevated idiom of the Neo-Sumerian royal hymns; and particular theological turns, above all the presentation of Enki as a river god who has “his dwelling” in the frozen river, stand closest to texts of the time of Šulgi. He therefore placed its composition at an Ur III court, in Ur itself or in Nippur, and its copying in the Old Babylonian school, where it served as an exercise or reading text.		Weidner argued that the composition itself is older than its copy on three grounds: the text is written consistently in Sumerian rather than in Akkadian with Sumerian glosses; its vocabulary and style match the elevated idiom of the Neo-Sumerian royal hymns; and particular theological turns, above all the presentation of Enki as a river god who has “his dwelling” in the frozen river, stand closest to texts of the time of Šulgi. He therefore placed its composition at an Ur III court, in Ur itself or in Nippur, and its copying in the Old Babylonian school, where it served as an exercise or reading text.
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	== Contents ==		== Contents ==
	The published ~~excerpt~~ begins where the expedition leaves the mountains. The badly damaged lines before it mention, in Akkadian, toponyms of the north-eastern frontier of the Sumerian world: Subartu, Lullubu and perhaps Elam, together with “narrow ways in the mountains” (''sila tur-tur kur-ra''). Weidner read this as a crossing from the Upper Mesopotamian lowland over a pass north of Arbela into the Zagros.		The published text begins where the expedition leaves the mountains. The badly damaged lines before it mention, in Akkadian, toponyms of the north-eastern frontier of the Sumerian world: Subartu, Lullubu and perhaps Elam, together with “narrow ways in the mountains” (''sila tur-tur kur-ra''). Weidner read this as a crossing from the Upper Mesopotamian lowland over a pass north of Arbela into the Zagros.

	Three Sumerian passages ~~follow~~.		Three Sumerian passages were published in 1938.

	;Steppe and wagon peoples (lines 16–25)		;Steppe and wagon peoples (lines 16–25)
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	:“Trees upon trees are in the foreign lands; in three days one cannot count them to an end.” The people of the forest eat “the necks of thick-haired beasts” and bring heavy furs and fine hides “for the neck of the king”. In the sky “birds” move, “fast as eyes that are set, like shining gold and lapis lazuli”; the locals say “there our gods are set”, and the scribe replies that “it is Inanna who lays her hand to rest there.”		:“Trees upon trees are in the foreign lands; in three days one cannot count them to an end.” The people of the forest eat “the necks of thick-haired beasts” and bring heavy furs and fine hides “for the neck of the king”. In the sky “birds” move, “fast as eyes that are set, like shining gold and lapis lazuli”; the locals say “there our gods are set”, and the scribe replies that “it is Inanna who lays her hand to rest there.”

	The ~~excerpt ends here. What~~ the fourth column ~~went on~~ to ~~record~~, and ~~how~~ the expedition ~~returned~~, is not ~~part of the publication~~.		The addendum of 1939 added the rest of the fourth column.

			;The head of the lands (lines 46–52)
			:The expedition reaches “the head of the lands”, where “a great river touches the heart of the foreign lands” and there is “no city, no cultivated place”. A stone is set up for the king, beer and fine oil are poured, and “the name of the king of the land” is set down at the head of the lands.
			;The furthest people and their tongue (lines 53–60)
			:The people there “dwell in houses of hide”, “know no donkey, know no wagon”, and have “great-horned oxen” that “draw a sledge over the whiteness”. Their tongue “is apart from the tongues of the other lands” and has to be turned “through a third interpreter”. Line 58 then records the name: ''eme-bi ki-li-ma-še3 mu-un-sa4-e-ne'', “their tongue they call ''ki-li-ma''” (𒆠𒇷𒈠). The interpreter glosses it (line 59) as ''eme ti-la'', “the living tongue”. The scribe closes the exchange in his usual manner (line 60): “it is a tongue that Nisaba does not know”, Nisaba being the goddess of writing; that is, an unwritten one.
			;Gifts, the tusk and the return (lines 61–67)
			:The people give “heavy hides, horns of the great-horned ox, and the tusk of the elephant of that land”; “the elephant of that land no one saw”. The foreigners say the tusk “comes out of the earth”; the scribe answers that “it is the bull of Enki that lies in the earth”. In the ninth month the expedition turns back towards Ur, leaves the frozen river on foot, and carries “the hides and the tusk for the neck of the king”. The column ends there; the return route is not described.

	== Weidner's commentary ==		== Weidner's commentary ==
	Weidner's commentary follows the route stage by stage. The “rivers of very many woods” of line 16 he located in the upper Diyala or Sirwan system; the wagon peoples in the contact zone between mountain and plateau, where river transport, caravan traffic and an early wagon culture met; and the frozen river north of the Elburz, either the lower Safid Rud or, further north, a tributary of the Caspian in the Transcaspian lowland, while admitting that the material does not allow identification. The forest zone with its fur-bearing animals and its “sky lights”, which he took to be the aurora, he placed in the belt of woodland stretching from the Caspian basin towards the Urals, where the Eurasian steppe corridor opens.		Weidner's commentary follows the route stage by stage. The “rivers of very many woods” of line 16 he located in the upper Diyala or Sirwan system; the wagon peoples in the contact zone between mountain and plateau, where river transport, caravan traffic and an early wagon culture met; and the frozen river north of the Elburz, either the lower Safid Rud or, further north, a tributary of the Caspian in the Transcaspian lowland, while admitting that the material does not allow identification. The forest zone with its fur-bearing animals and its “sky lights”, which he took to be the aurora, he placed in the belt of woodland stretching from the Caspian basin towards the Urals, where the Eurasian steppe corridor opens.

	Two smaller observations have been widely quoted. Line 20, ''anše-kur-ra-ĝu10 ma-da-an-du11'', “they spoke to my mountain donkey in their land”, he read as a joke of the scribe's: the whole Sumerian caravan personified as “donkey people” with whom the local wagon-drivers must first negotiate. And the repeated pattern in which the foreigners explain a phenomenon and the scribe reinterprets it through his own gods, the frozen river as Enki's house, the lights as Inanna's hand, he singled out as the characteristic method by which a Mesopotamian scholar absorbed the foreign into his own world.		Two smaller observations have been widely quoted. Line 20, ''anše-kur-ra-ĝu10 ma-da-an-du11'', “they spoke to my mountain donkey in their land”, he read as a joke of the scribe's: the whole Sumerian caravan personified as “donkey people” with whom the local wagon-drivers must first negotiate. And the repeated pattern in which the foreigners explain a phenomenon and the scribe reinterprets it through his own gods, the frozen river as Enki's house, the lights as Inanna's hand, he singled out as the characteristic method by which a Mesopotamian scholar absorbed the foreign into his own world. The addendum shows the pattern continuing to the end of the text: the unwritten tongue becomes one “Nisaba does not know”, and ivory dug from the ground becomes “the bull of Enki that lies in the earth”.

			On the tusk Weidner was brief: ''zu2 am-si'' is the ordinary Sumerian word for ivory, and the scribe has a word for the material but none for the animal. He compared the reports of fossil ivory gathered from river banks and thawing ground in northern Siberia, without drawing further conclusions.<ref name="Weidner1939" />

	In his closing remarks Weidner drew the wider conclusion that the connection from northern Mesopotamia over the Zagros, the Iranian plateau and the Caspian rim to the north Eurasian forest and steppe region was, at least occasionally, a real and not merely an imagined one.		In his closing remarks Weidner drew the wider conclusion that the connection from northern Mesopotamia over the Zagros, the Iranian plateau and the Caspian rim to the north Eurasian forest and steppe region was, at least occasionally, a real and not merely an imagined one.

			== The name ''ki-li-ma'' ==
			Line 58 is the only place in the text where a foreign word is written out rather than described. The three signs 𒆠𒇷𒈠 can be read ''ki-li-ma'' or ''ke4-le-ma''. Sumerian orthography cannot write two consonants at the beginning of a word, and foreign names with initial clusters are regularly broken up with a vowel in cuneiform, so a form with a cluster, ''klema'' or ''klima'', is at least as likely as the four-syllable one. What the scribe was told the word meant is given in the next line, “the living tongue”.

			Weidner treated the name as a curiosity. It acquired a second life in the 2020s, when writers on the [[Kristiansen coding system\|Kristiansen corpus]] began to use “Klema” for the sign system and the language presumed to lie behind it, on the strength of geography alone: the itinerary places a language so called in the forest zone north of the Caspian around 2100 BC, and the [[Yedoma Ledger]], the only physical object proposed as a carrier of the corpus, comes from the north Eurasian permafrost. The blog ''[[Klema Field Notes]]'' carries the name in its title. No published study has argued that the people the expedition met were the people who wrote the corpus, and the tablets themselves say the tongue was unwritten.

			The name is therefore a misnomer of a familiar kind. Hittite is named after the land of Hatti and its biblical inhabitants, while the speakers of the language called it ''nešili'', after the city of Neša; the label stuck because it was the first one available, and philology has lived with it. “Klema” names a language by the word a Sumerian scribe heard from a forest people who may or may not have been its speakers, and applies it to a script that no Sumerian ever saw. Its users accept this. Roelandt has written that it may be “the wrong name for the wrong script”, and that it is nevertheless “a better name than ‘the Kristiansen corpus’”.

	== Publication and reception ==		== Publication and reception ==
	The article appeared in April ~~1938~~ and was illustrated with a single pen drawing of a caravan descending into a snowy steppe. It gives the tablet's physical description but not its museum number or present whereabouts, and no photograph or hand copy of the tablet was included. The ~~unpublished~~ remainder of the text ~~has been a standing complaint of later readers~~.		The 1938 article appeared in April and was illustrated with a single pen drawing of a caravan descending into a snowy steppe. It gives the tablet's physical description but not its museum number or present whereabouts, and no photograph or hand copy of the tablet was included. The addendum of 1939, a few pages in a late issue of the same series, supplied the transliteration and translation of the remaining lines and the colophon, again without a copy or photograph. Published on the eve of the war in a small print run, it was not cited for decades, and the remainder of the text was widely believed to be unedited until the addendum was identified in 2026.<ref name="Weidner1939" />

	The itinerary is cited in discussion of the [[Kristiansen coding system\|Kristiansen corpus]] for ~~one reason only: it~~ is the earliest text placing a literate Mesopotamian expedition in the north Eurasian forest zone, the broad region from which the [[Yedoma Ledger]] was later recovered. Nothing in ~~the published excerpt~~ mentions ~~writing,~~ inscribed bone or ivory, or any encounter with a script, ~~and no~~ direct connection between the itinerary and the corpus has been proposed in print.		The itinerary is cited in discussion of the [[Kristiansen coding system\|Kristiansen corpus]] for two reasons. It is the earliest text placing a literate Mesopotamian expedition in the north Eurasian forest zone, the broad region from which the [[Yedoma Ledger]] was later recovered, and it carries the name that the corpus has come to bear. Nothing in either publication mentions inscribed bone or ivory or any encounter with a script; the one statement about writing in the text is the scribe's own, that the tongue he heard was unwritten. No direct connection between the itinerary and the corpus has been proposed in print.

	== See also ==		== See also ==
	* [[Yedoma Ledger]]		* [[Yedoma Ledger]]
	* [[Kristiansen coding system]]		* [[Kristiansen coding system]]
			* [[Klema Field Notes]]
	* [[Dur-Untash Expedition]]		* [[Dur-Untash Expedition]]