Nordland Itinerary

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. 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. 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; they contain the only foreign language name recorded by a Mesopotamian source north of the Caspian, ki-li-ma, from which the modern term Klema is taken.

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. 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.

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. 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 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 were published in 1938.

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 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 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. 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.

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 2024, when Marie Roelandt, who had located the addendum, named her blog after it, and writers on the 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’”.

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 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.

The itinerary is cited in discussion of the 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

• Yedoma Ledger
• Kristiansen coding system
• Klema Field Notes
• Dur-Untash Expedition