About Klema Field Notes
This is my working notebook at the crossroads of linguistics and codebreaking, dedicated to one particularly stubborn language and its alphabet. Here you’ll find careful but playful experiments: sign lists, frequency counts, wild hypotheses, and the occasional theory that survives contact with the data. I document not only what seems to work, but also the dead ends, false starts, and revisions, so every post is an invitation to follow the trail of reasoning rather than just the conclusions. Nothing here is a “final decipherment”: it’s an open lab, where ideas can be tested, challenged, and refined in public.
Recent Posts
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What we know, and what we don’t
A guide for people who have just arrived: five texts, one set of codes, what is settled, what is not, and where the name comes from.
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Who’s who in the Zagi family?
Using only the internal structure of the Zagi tablets, without guessing sounds or meanings, I argue that the Kristiansen glyphs record a fully consistent family tree for the “clan of Zagi,” complete with parents, children, grandparents, and even a couple of probable scribal slips.
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The Zagi Family
Üksküla sees a “genealogical primer for the clan of Zagi” in the Zagi documents. I think it’s more likely to be a very simple list of family relations in a small clan or band.