Marie Roelandt
I’m Marie, an amateur linguist, code breaker, genealogist, and more. I trained as a librarian, I spent most of my working life in archival document management, and I read too many preprints. I live in Antwerp. This blog is where I think out loud about the Kristiansen corpus, mostly the Zagi tablets.
Why Klema?
In February 2024, before I had written a word here, I went looking in the old Assyriological literature for anything that put a literate Mesopotamian anywhere near the region the Yedoma Ledger came out of. I found H. Weidner’s 1938 article on the Nordland Itinerary in the Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft, and then, in an incomplete run of the same series, a short addendum from 1939 that nobody seems to have cited since the war. It gives the last lines of the tablet. In one of them the people at “the head of the lands” tell the expedition what they call their own tongue: ki-li-ma, which the interpreter glossed as “the living tongue”.
I took it for the name of this blog. I want to be exact about what that line does and does not do. It names a language spoken somewhere in the northern forests around 2100 BC. It does not say that language was written; the scribe says the opposite. Nothing connects the people he met to the people who cut the signs I write about, except a very large region and a hunch. So Klema may well be the wrong name for the wrong script. It is still a better name than ‘the Kristiansen corpus’. 🙂
If you are new here, start with the two Zagi posts. If you have a bone, a tracing or a museum number, please write to me.