Central Anatolia in the Nineteenth and Eighteenth Centuries BC

Abstract

Central Anatolia in the Nineteenth and Eighteenth Centuries BCAt the beginning of the second millennium BC, certain sites in central Anatolia, such as Acemhöyük and Kültepe, underwent considerable changes and attracted Assyrian merchants from the southeast.These sites have been excavated for several decades now.They have yielded abundant findings and have allowed us to better understand the environment and material culture of the societies indigenous to the region.The earliest written sources discovered in Anatolia are foreign: they belong to the archives of merchants from As ˇs ˇur, who settled at the city of Kanis ˇ in the 19th and 18th centuries BC.Kanis ˇ, whose modern name is Kültepe, is located nearby the modern city of Kayseri.Although these documents record the trade relations between Assyrians and Anatolians, they also indirectly document the political organization of Anatolia and its constituent states.To reconstruct the history of a region based primarily on foreign sources necessarily limits the results: we are restricted to those areas of activity, within which the Assyrian merchants operated, and even within these areas, we get a very partial and fragmentary account of events.For example, the Assyrians never named the rulers of the different city-states that they resided in.Fortunately, the few surviving archives belonging to Anatolians offer a more detailed account.The period on which this article focuses is several centuries earlier than the founding of the Mittani state; in examining this era we would be hard pressed to learn, from the Anatolian point of view, something about the state's origins or the circumstances of its rise to power.This study aims instead to paint a picture of the history and organization of Anatolia in the first centuries of the second millenium BC.A synoptic description of the Anatolian region and its resources during this period will permit us to better understand the political and economic organization of the small Anatolian states and to better analyze the different conflicts that set them against one another during the period documented in the Old Assyrian archives.In the ka ¯rum of Kanis ˇ, the Assyrians interacted regularly with Anatolians as well as other foreign merchants, including the Hurrians, who would later found the state of Mittani.

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