Nordland Itinerary
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.[1] 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.[1]
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.[2] 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 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.