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]]

File:Weidner 1938 Abb 1.jpg

Mvuijlst — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 11:07:19 GMT

Mvuijlst uploaded File:Weidner 1938 Abb 1.jpg Abb. 1 of Weidner 1938: caravan descending into a snowy steppe (from the zog repo, downscaled)

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Abb. 1 of Weidner 1938: caravan descending into a snowy steppe (from the zog repo, downscaled)

Kristiansen coding system

Mvuijlst — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 11:06:57 GMT

Yedoma Ledger

Mvuijlst — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 11:06:56 GMT

Nordland Itinerary

Mvuijlst — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 11:06:55 GMT

Create article on Weidner's 1938 Neo-Sumerian itinerary into the north

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[[File:Weidner 1938 Abb 1.jpg|thumb|Weidner's Abb. 1: a caravan descending from a rocky mountain edge into a wide, snow-covered steppe (pen drawing, 1938).]]
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.

== 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" />

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.

The itinerary belongs to a small class of Mesopotamian texts that record day-marches and stages of travel, of which the best known real example is the Old Babylonian itinerary published by Goetze in 1953.<ref name="Goetze1953">A. Goetze, “An Old Babylonian Itinerary,” ''Journal of Cuneiform Studies'' 7 (1953): 51–72.</ref> Weidner's text differs from that class in one respect: at the decisive transitions of the journey the scribe abandons the bare listing of stages for short passages in a poetic register, in which the strangeness of the northern lands is put into words.

== 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.

Three Sumerian passages follow.

;Steppe and wagon peoples (lines 16–25)
:The travellers reach “very great rivers” whose “foreign tongues we did not know”, meet “men with boats and pack animals” who “set many wagons in motion”, negotiate with the caravan, and receive “weapons and strong hands”, which Weidner took to mean an armed escort through unsafe country. The land has no city; its people “do not eat grain bread, they eat only pig and fat cattle.”
;Cold, snow and the frozen river (lines 26–35)
:“In the seventh month white things moved from the sky, like chaff of the great threshing floor they fell to earth, the land became white, our great river became white.” Men and donkeys put their weight on the ice and carry “the water things over the water”. The foreigners say the river “is no longer there”; the scribe answers that this is “the house-river of Enki”, the place where the river god has set his dwelling.
;Forest, furs and sky lights (lines 36–45)
:“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.

== 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.

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.

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.

== 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 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.

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

== References ==
<references />

[[Category:Klema]]
[[Category:Epigraphy]]
[[Category:Parafictional Mesopotamian archaeology]]

Kristiansen coding system

Mvuijlst — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 11:03:34 GMT

Corpus section: note the Yedoma Ledger as the only proposed physical carrier

← Older revision		Revision as of 11:03, 22 September 2026
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	Whether these texts share a single origin is not established. They share a sign inventory, the divider, and the same broad clause architecture; the Zagi Tablets add a cuneiform rendering and an Akkadian heading that the others lack.		Whether these texts share a single origin is not established. They share a sign inventory, the divider, and the same broad clause architecture; the Zagi Tablets add a cuneiform rendering and an Akkadian heading that the others lack.

			No physical object has been securely tied to any of them. The [[Yedoma Ledger]], a mammoth-ivory plaque with ruled incised registers recovered from Siberian permafrost in 2021, has been proposed informally as the carrier of the longer companion inscription, on grounds of chronology and register geometry rather than of any published sign comparison; neither its excavator nor Kristiansen has endorsed the identification.

	== Reception ==		== Reception ==

Yedoma Ledger

Mvuijlst — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 11:03:33 GMT

Add section on the possible relation to the Kristiansen corpus; link the coding-system hub

← Older revision		Revision as of 11:03, 22 September 2026
Line 25:		Line 25:
	== Interpretation ==		== Interpretation ==
	Published descriptions remain neutral and descriptive; no consensus interpretation (notation, decoration, or other function) has been advanced. Pending secure dating and replication studies, the Yedoma Ledger is cited as a candidate example of worked ivory from permafrost context rather than as evidence for a particular symbolic system.<ref name="Schueltke2021" />		Published descriptions remain neutral and descriptive; no consensus interpretation (notation, decoration, or other function) has been advanced. Pending secure dating and replication studies, the Yedoma Ledger is cited as a candidate example of worked ivory from permafrost context rather than as evidence for a particular symbolic system.<ref name="Schueltke2021" />

			== Possible relation to the Kristiansen corpus ==
			Since 2024 the Ledger has been discussed, so far only informally, as a candidate physical carrier for material in the [[Kristiansen coding system]]. The suggestion rests on three observations rather than on any direct comparison of signs.

			First, chronology. Schültke's preliminary report, which circulated in 2021, describes the incised face as a series of registers bounded by guide lines but publishes only one photograph and no tracing. [[Jan-Tage Kristiansen]]'s 2023 correspondence note and his longer working paper were based on drawings and a transcription received by anonymous email in the two years that followed, with no indication of the object drawn.<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>

			Second, geometry. The scapula inscription (KS-01) is a short abecedary and cannot be the Ledger, whose registers run the full 216 mm of the prepared face. Kristiansen's ''longer companion inscription'', however, was supplied as a transcription only: six lines, 146 tokens, medium unstated. At the roughly one-centimetre sign pitch reported for the scapula, a 216 mm register holds about twenty signs, which is in keeping with a six-line text averaging some twenty-four tokens a line. The stroke repertoire described by Schültke, straight and oblique cuts with chevrons and cross-hatching, is consistent with the Triangle, Barred-post and Comb families of the signary, though it is equally consistent with a great deal of Upper Palaeolithic ornament.

			Third, the absence of any other candidate. The Ledger is the only object publicly documented from a controlled recovery whose incisions are organised in ruled registers of the kind the Kristiansen corpus presupposes.

			None of this amounts to an identification. Schültke has not commented on the Kristiansen literature, and his report predates it. Kristiansen, asked whether the anonymous transcription could derive from the Ledger, replied that he had “no basis for saying so and no basis for denying it,” and that the question would be settled by a full-resolution tracing of the Ledger's registers, which the regional heritage authority has not released.<ref name="Kristiansen2023h" /> Until such a tracing exists the Ledger remains, in the words of its own preliminary report, a candidate example of worked ivory from permafrost context, and the Kristiansen corpus remains a set of drawings without an object.

	== Significance ==		== Significance ==
Line 31:		Line 42:
	== See also ==		== See also ==

			* [[Kristiansen coding system]]
			* [[Scapula Glyph Inscription]]
	* [[Yedoma]]		* [[Yedoma]]
	* [[Woolly mammoth]]		* [[Woolly mammoth]]

File:Dozenal successor schema.png

Mvuijlst — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 11:00:05 GMT

Mvuijlst uploaded a new version of File:Dozenal successor schema.png Regenerate with current signary coding: THREE uses L02 (LINE-HOR) for e; rendered from KlemaMonospace

New page

The four examples render the successor chain 1→2, 2→3, 3→4, 4→5, demonstrating that adding the simplex unit “ONE” advances X to its next value while preserving clause structure. Codes follow Kristiansen’s signary; glyph labels (“ONE”, “TWO”, …) are semantic glosses for expository clarity and do not assume phonetic values.

Kristiansen corpus

Mvuijlst — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 10:29:54 GMT

Redirect to the hub article Kristiansen coding system

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#REDIRECT [[Kristiansen coding system]]

Kristiansen coding system

Mvuijlst — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 10:29:51 GMT

Create hub article: principles, conventions, full signary, distributional classes, corpus, reception

New page

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 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.

== Principles ==
Kristiansen's note set out three rules that later work has kept:
* '''One code per sign.''' Every distinct grapheme in the inventory receives one code; no code is assigned to a sequence.
* '''Family letter plus index.''' The letter names one of eight visually coherent families, identified by shared construction (a corner, a closed box, a triangle, and so on). The index numbers the members of a family in the order they appear on the scapula. A ninth letter, P, is reserved for the single divider sign.
* '''Rotation and diacritics are features, not new families.''' Signs that differ only by rotation or by an added dot, bar or diagonal tick stay within their family and are distinguished by index. Kristiansen's original signary carried a rotation column; later work by [[Camille Voudrin]] and colleagues treated rotation as a non-contrastive convenience and canonicalised signs rotation-agnostically, with no effect on the inventory.

== Transcription conventions ==
* Signs within a word are joined by hyphens: <code>C01-M03-S01-C02</code>. Words are separated by spaces.
* The divider '''P01''' is transcribed as a sign in its own right. In the [[Dozenal Primer Inscription]] and the [[Zagi Tablets]] it occurs only at clause ends and is written bound to the last word of the clause (<code>…-T03-P01</code>).
* Sentences in the longer corpora are numbered by document and position, for example <code>F3_44</code> for the forty-fourth sentence in Document 3 of the Zagi Tablets. This numbering originates with [[Inrik Üksküla]]'s preprint and is used by [[Marie Roelandt]].
* Uncertain or damaged signs are written <code>??</code> in place of a code.

== The signary ==
The unified signary contains 31 signs in eight families plus the divider, 32 codes in all. Every one of them is attested once on the scapula (KS-01), which presents the families as an ordered sweep and so fixes the index order.<ref name="Kristiansen2023h" /> Rotation and feature descriptions follow Kristiansen's catalogue.

{| class="wikitable" style="font-size:95%;"
! scope="col" | Code !! scope="col" | Glyph !! scope="col" | Mnemonic !! scope="col" | Rotation !! scope="col" | Distinguishing features
|-
! colspan="5" style="text-align:left; background:#f2f2f2;" | Corner family (C), 7 signs
|-
| C01 || [[File:C01.svg|24px|alt=C01|link=]] || CORNER-NW || rot0 || shape=right-angle, open=NE, marks=none
|-
| C02 || [[File:C02.svg|24px|alt=C02|link=]] || CORNER-SE || rot180 || shape=right-angle, open=SE, marks=none
|-
| C03 || [[File:C03.svg|24px|alt=C03|link=]] || CORNER-SE-DOT || rot180 || shape=right-angle, open=SE, dot=centerline
|-
| C04 || [[File:C04.svg|24px|alt=C04|link=]] || CORNER-NW-DIAG || rot0 || shape=right-angle, open=NE, tick=diagonal, axis=NW-SE
|-
| C05 || [[File:C05.svg|24px|alt=C05|link=]] || CORNER-SE-DIAG || rot180 || shape=right-angle, open=SE, tick=diagonal, axis=NW-SE
|-
| C06 || [[File:C06.svg|24px|alt=C06|link=]] || CORNER-NW-DIAG-DOT || rot0 || shape=right-angle, open=NE, tick=diagonal, axis=NW-SE, dot=centerline
|-
| C07 || [[File:C07.svg|24px|alt=C07|link=]] || CORNER-SE-DIAG-DOT || rot180 || shape=right-angle, open=SE, notch=orthogonal, depth=short, dot=centerline
|-
! colspan="5" style="text-align:left; background:#f2f2f2;" | Box family (B), 5 signs
|-
| B01 || [[File:B01.svg|24px|alt=B01|link=]] || BOX || rot0 || outline=square, interior=clear
|-
| B02 || [[File:B02.svg|24px|alt=B02|link=]] || BOX-DOT || rot0 || outline=square, dot=center
|-
| B03 || [[File:B03.svg|24px|alt=B03|link=]] || BOX-TICK || rot0 || outline=square, notch=orthogonal, wall=top, depth=short
|-
| B04 || [[File:B04.svg|24px|alt=B04|link=]] || BOX-DIAG-SW-NE || rot0 || outline=square, tick=diagonal, entry=SW-NE
|-
| B05 || [[File:B05.svg|24px|alt=B05|link=]] || BOX-DOT-DIAG-SW-NE || rot0 || outline=square, tick=diagonal, entry=SW-NE, dot=corner_NE
|-
! colspan="5" style="text-align:left; background:#f2f2f2;" | Triangle family (A), 5 signs
|-
| A01 || [[File:A01.svg|24px|alt=A01|link=]] || TRI-OPEN || rot0 || closure=open, apex=up
|-
| A02 || [[File:A02.svg|24px|alt=A02|link=]] || TRI-BAR || rot180 || closure=open, apex=down, bar=1, position=mid
|-
| A03 || [[File:A03.svg|24px|alt=A03|link=]] || TRI-DOT || rot180 || closure=open, apex=down, bar=1, position=mid, dot=center
|-
| A04 || [[File:A04.svg|24px|alt=A04|link=]] || TRI-VEE || rot180 || closure=open, apex=down, vee=1, orientation=apex-base
|-
| A05 || [[File:A05.svg|24px|alt=A05|link=]] || TRI-CLOSED-BAR || rot0 || closure=closed, apex=up, bar=1, position=mid
|-
! colspan="5" style="text-align:left; background:#f2f2f2;" | Line family (L), 2 signs
|-
| L01 || [[File:L01.svg|24px|alt=L01|link=]] || LINE-VERT || rot0 || orientation=vertical, length=cell
|-
| L02 || [[File:L02.svg|24px|alt=L02|link=]] || LINE-HOR || rot90 || orientation=horizontal, length=cell
|-
! colspan="5" style="text-align:left; background:#f2f2f2;" | Tee family (T), 3 signs
|-
| T01 || [[File:T01.svg|24px|alt=T01|link=]] || TEE-UP || rot0 || stem=vertical, bar=top
|-
| T02 || [[File:T02.svg|24px|alt=T02|link=]] || TEE-LEFT || rot90 || stem=horizontal, bar=left
|-
| T03 || [[File:T03.svg|24px|alt=T03|link=]] || UPSIDE-DOWN-TEE || rot180 || stem=vertical, bar=bottom
|-
! colspan="5" style="text-align:left; background:#f2f2f2;" | Comb family (M), 3 signs
|-
| M01 || [[File:M01.svg|24px|alt=M01|link=]] || COMB-2-N || rot0 || tines=2, stem=vertical, tines_side=left/top
|-
| M02 || [[File:M02.svg|24px|alt=M02|link=]] || COMB-2-W || rot0 || tines=2, stem=vertical, tines_side=left
|-
| M03 || [[File:M03.svg|24px|alt=M03|link=]] || COMB-3-E || rot0 || tines=3, stem=vertical, tines_side=right
|-
! colspan="5" style="text-align:left; background:#f2f2f2;" | Meander family (S), 3 signs
|-
| S01 || [[File:S01.svg|24px|alt=S01|link=]] || MEANDER-2 || rot0 || elements=2, hollow=false
|-
| S02 || [[File:S02.svg|24px|alt=S02|link=]] || MEANDER-2-HOLLOW || rot0 || elements=2, hollow=true
|-
| S03 || [[File:S03.svg|24px|alt=S03|link=]] || MEANDER-3 || rot0 || elements=3, hollow=false
|-
! colspan="5" style="text-align:left; background:#f2f2f2;" | Barred-post family (H), 3 signs
|-
| H01 || [[File:H01.svg|24px|alt=H01|link=]] || DOUBLE-POST-CONNECTED || rot0 || posts=2, parallel, connector=base, bars=0
|-
| H02 || [[File:H02.svg|24px|alt=H02|link=]] || POST-DOUBLE-BAR || rot0 || posts=1, bars=2, bar_style=cross, bar_positions=mid, upper
|-
| H03 || [[File:H03.svg|24px|alt=H03|link=]] || DOUBLE-POST-BAR || rot0 || posts=2, parallel, bars=1, bridging=true, bar_position=mid
|-
! colspan="5" style="text-align:left; background:#f2f2f2;" | Punct family (P), 1 sign
|-
| P01 || [[File:P01.svg|24px|alt=P01|link=]] || SLASH || rot30 || punct=slash, function=separator
|}

== Distributional classes ==
Working only from sign distributions in three longer inscriptions, Voudrin, Marchand and Leclerc (2024) found that the inventory partitions almost deterministically into two classes with the behaviour expected of consonants and vowels. The consonant-like class comprises the Corner, Box, Triangle and Comb families; the vowel-like class comprises the Tee, Line, Meander and Barred-post families. No family was split between the two classes.<ref name="Voudrin2024">Camille Voudrin, Solène Marchand, and Hadrien Leclerc, “A distributional test of vowel–consonant structure in an undeciphered signary suggests robust class separation,” ''[[Language Codes]]'' 7 (2024): 1281–1294.</ref> The authors stress that this is a structural result and not a decipherment.

== The corpus ==
Texts transcribed in the system, in order of publication:
* '''[[Scapula Glyph Inscription]]''' (KS-01), 2023. Four ruled lines on a scapula-shaped object; the abecedary-like presentation from which the signary was compiled.
* '''A longer companion inscription''', 2023. Six lines and 146 tokens supplied as a transcription, analysed statistically in Kristiansen's longer working paper.
* '''[[Dozenal Primer Inscription]]''', 2024. Forty-five clauses read by [[Ginevra Rubergskier]] as a primer for base-12 arithmetic.
* '''Three extended inscriptions''', 2024. The material analysed by Voudrin and colleagues for vowel–consonant structure; published as vector tracings in their paper.
* '''[[Zagi Tablets]]''', 2024. One hundred and four sentences on four clay tablets, headed in Akkadian ''imri Zagi-ak'', analysed by [[Inrik Üksküla]] and, on the blog ''[[Klema Field Notes]]'', by [[Marie Roelandt]].

Whether these texts share a single origin is not established. They share a sign inventory, the divider, and the same broad clause architecture; the Zagi Tablets add a cuneiform rendering and an Akkadian heading that the others lack.

== Reception ==
The system's chief virtue is that it commits its users to nothing. Rubergskier's arithmetic reading, Voudrin's phonological partition and Roelandt's genealogical reading all operate on the same codes and can be compared token for token, which would be impossible had each study adopted its own transliteration. Roelandt's working transliteration into Latin letters is explicitly a readability aid layered on top of the codes, not a replacement for them.

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.”

== See also ==
* [[Jan-Tage Kristiansen]]
* [[Scapula Glyph Inscription]]
* [[Dozenal Primer Inscription]]
* [[Zagi Tablets]]
* [[Language Codes]]
* [[Klema Field Notes]]

== References ==
<references />

[[Category:Kristiansen corpus]]
[[Category:Writing systems]]
[[Category:Epigraphy]]

Dozenal Primer Inscription

Mvuijlst — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 10:27:17 GMT

Regenerate glyph frequency table from current transcription (45 clauses, 838 tokens, 28 types; adds B05 and L02)

Show changes

Yedoma Ledger

Mvuijlst — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 10:19:19 GMT

Yenoma -> Yedoma in name, lead and interpretation

← Older revision		Revision as of 10:19, 22 September 2026
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	{{Infobox		{{Infobox
	\| name = ~~Yenoma~~ Ledger		\| name = Yedoma Ledger
	\| image = Yenoma Ledger.jpg		\| image = Yenoma Ledger.jpg
	\| caption = Plaque with incised geometric registers		\| caption = Plaque with incised geometric registers
Line 12:		Line 12:
	}}		}}

	The '''~~Yenoma~~ Ledger''' is a worked plaque of mammoth ivory reportedly recovered from [[permafrost]] in the lower Indigirka region of northeast Siberia. The object was discovered and handled in the field by a small team led by [[J. Levi Schültke]] during a rapid-impact survey of thaw gullies commissioned to document erosion threats to organic artefacts; Schültke’s group was engaged for its prior experience with cold-chain recovery and identification of proboscidean ivory.<ref name="Schueltke2021">J. Levi Schültke, ''A Mammoth-Ivory Plaque with Geometric Incisions from Northeast Siberia: Discovery, Context, and Materials Analysis'' (preliminary field and materials report, Seminar für Archäologie der Periglazialzonen, 2021).</ref> Its carved surface shows parallel bands of straight and oblique incisions, including chevrons and cross-hatching. The preliminary report describes controlled cold-chain recovery and non-destructive documentation but does not advance a cultural attribution or secure the age of the carving itself.<ref name="Schueltke2021" />		The '''Yedoma Ledger''' is a worked plaque of mammoth ivory reportedly recovered from [[permafrost]] in the lower Indigirka region of northeast Siberia. The object was discovered and handled in the field by a small team led by [[J. Levi Schültke]] during a rapid-impact survey of thaw gullies commissioned to document erosion threats to organic artefacts; Schültke’s group was engaged for its prior experience with cold-chain recovery and identification of proboscidean ivory.<ref name="Schueltke2021">J. Levi Schültke, ''A Mammoth-Ivory Plaque with Geometric Incisions from Northeast Siberia: Discovery, Context, and Materials Analysis'' (preliminary field and materials report, Seminar für Archäologie der Periglazialzonen, 2021).</ref> Its carved surface shows parallel bands of straight and oblique incisions, including chevrons and cross-hatching. The preliminary report describes controlled cold-chain recovery and non-destructive documentation but does not advance a cultural attribution or secure the age of the carving itself.<ref name="Schueltke2021" />

	== Discovery and context ==		== Discovery and context ==
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	== Interpretation ==		== Interpretation ==
	Published descriptions remain neutral and descriptive; no consensus interpretation (notation, decoration, or other function) has been advanced. Pending secure dating and replication studies, the ~~Yenoma~~ Ledger is cited as a candidate example of worked ivory from permafrost context rather than as evidence for a particular symbolic system.<ref name="Schueltke2021" />		Published descriptions remain neutral and descriptive; no consensus interpretation (notation, decoration, or other function) has been advanced. Pending secure dating and replication studies, the Yedoma Ledger is cited as a candidate example of worked ivory from permafrost context rather than as evidence for a particular symbolic system.<ref name="Schueltke2021" />

	== Significance ==		== Significance ==

Jan-Tage Kristiansen

Mvuijlst — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 10:16:41 GMT

Eight families plus divider; add 2023 working paper and ELTTT affiliation

← Older revision		Revision as of 10:16, 22 September 2026
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	'''Jan-Tage Kristiansen''' (born 1971) is a Norwegian-Estonian philologist and independent researcher based in Tallinn. He trained as a linguist at the University of Bergen, where his MA thesis examined positional constraints in runic epigraphy, before completing a doctorate at the University of Tartu in 2001 on graphemic variability in undeciphered scripts of the eastern Baltic region.		'''Jan-Tage Kristiansen''' (born 1971) is a Norwegian-Estonian philologist and independent researcher based in Tallinn. He trained as a linguist at the University of Bergen, where his MA thesis examined positional constraints in runic epigraphy, before completing a doctorate at the University of Tartu in 2001 on graphemic variability in undeciphered scripts of the eastern Baltic region.

	Kristiansen worked for several years as a cataloguer at the Estonian History Museum before leaving institutional employment to pursue independent research. He has described his working method as "palaeographic accountancy": systematic inventory of graphemic features before any interpretive commitment.		Kristiansen worked for several years as a cataloguer at the Estonian History Museum before leaving institutional employment to pursue independent research. He is a corresponding member of ELTTT-Selskabet, a small learned society in Aarhus, under whose affiliation his longer work has appeared. He has described his working method as "palaeographic accountancy": systematic inventory of graphemic features before any interpretive commitment.

	== Work ==		== Work ==
	Kristiansen's correspondence note "Twin renderings, single template: a ruled signary on a putative cervid scapula" (''language'' 27, October 2023: 1073–1074) introduced the alphanumeric coding system now used throughout the scholarly literature on the [[Scapula Glyph Inscription]] and related texts. The note described a short, four-line inscription on a scapula-shaped object, identified ~~nine~~ visually coherent sign families (labelled A ~~through~~ T, ~~with~~ P ~~reserved~~ for the divider), and provided a full positional frequency table. Kristiansen declined to propose a cultural attribution, noting that circulating images of the object appeared to derive from a single original drawing and that higher-resolution imaging was desirable before drawing further conclusions.		Kristiansen's correspondence note "Twin renderings, single template: a ruled signary on a putative cervid scapula" (''language'' 27, October 2023: 1073–1074) introduced the alphanumeric coding system now used throughout the scholarly literature on the [[Scapula Glyph Inscription]] and related texts. The note described a short, four-line inscription on a scapula-shaped object, identified eight visually coherent sign families (Corner, Box, Triangle, Line, Tee, Comb, Meander and Barred-post, labelled A, B, C, H, L, M, S and T), reserved a ninth code, P, for the slash divider, and provided a full positional frequency table. Kristiansen declined to propose a cultural attribution, noting that circulating images of the object appeared to derive from a single original drawing and that higher-resolution imaging was desirable before drawing further conclusions.

	The coding system he established, in which each sign receives a family letter and index number (C01, B04, P01, and so on), was subsequently adopted without modification by [[Ginevra Rubergskier]], [[Camille Voudrin]], [[Inrik Üksküla]], and others, giving the note an influence disproportionate to its two-page length.		The coding system he established, in which each sign receives a family letter and index number (C01, B04, P01, and so on), was subsequently adopted without modification by [[Ginevra Rubergskier]], [[Camille Voudrin]], [[Inrik Üksküla]], and others, giving the note an influence disproportionate to its two-page length.

	Kristiansen has continued to maintain the signary as a stable reference document, issuing minor corrections to the preliminary frequency table following the appearance of higher-quality tracings in 2024. He has not published ~~a full~~ interpretive article of his own, describing his role as "keeping the inventory honest."		Later in 2023 Kristiansen circulated a longer working paper, "A geometric signary on a scapula and a longer companion inscription: inventory, layout, and statistical structure", under the ELTTT-Selskabet affiliation. It compiles the unified signary across the eight families, describes the scapula as a single ordered sweep through those families with slash separators, and reports positional biases, high-PMI collocations and bigram and trigram entropies below frequency-preserving shuffles in a six-line, 146-token companion inscription. The paper makes no claim of linguistic content and states that, given the anonymous digital-only provenance, a hoax or modern didactic pastiche cannot be excluded.

			Kristiansen has continued to maintain the signary as a stable reference document, issuing minor corrections to the preliminary frequency table following the appearance of higher-quality tracings in 2024. He has not published an interpretive article of his own, describing his role as "keeping the inventory honest."

	== Other interests ==		== Other interests ==

← Older revision		Revision as of 11:06, 22 September 2026
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	* [[Language Codes]]		* [[Language Codes]]
	* [[Klema Field Notes]]		* [[Klema Field Notes]]
			* [[Nordland Itinerary]]

	== References ==		== References ==