The Old Assyrian Period (20th–18th Century bce )

Abstract

The Old Assyrian Period began when Ashur, around 2025 BCE, became independent after the empire of the Third Dynasty of Ur had lost control of its 'periphery', in the northwestern edge of which Ashur was located. The inscriptions of Ilusuma and Erisum I show that Ashur's early rulers took measures to attract foreign traders and to facilitate the exchange of goods. Written evidence for the trade, however, only becomes available during the last decades of the 20th century BCE, in the form of texts preserved in the archives of karum Kanis. Judging from the number and variety of texts the Assyrian trade peaked during the reign of Sargon. The main governmental body of Ashur was “the City”, that is the City Assembly, which took all the important decisions. Nearly all references to the City Assembly concern lawsuits about conflicts between individual citizens, but some decisions concern commercial or economic policy.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 35 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.