Assyrians Abroad: Expanding Borders Through Mobile Identities in the Middle Bronze Age

Abstract

Abstract Recent work by both archaeologists and Assyriologists has characterized the main Assyrian settlement at Kaneš/Kültepe not as “colony” at all but as a place in which Assyrians fully integrated themselves into Anatolian society to create a hybridized community or “middle ground.” This paper builds upon their work by examining the ways in which Assyrians participated in such an intercultural society whilst still maintaining the bounded social category of “Assyrian.” Through the reconstruction of their civic institutions and social traditions abroad, Assyrian merchants were able to expand their mental topography of what constituted “Assyrian-ness” from northern Mesopotamia across central Anatolia. This phenomenon is framed within wider discussions of mobile societies and the Old Assyrian textual record to illustrate that a community identity founded upon the mother city of Assur and its cultural conventions continued to thrive across various political and cultural borders. Treaties and letters demonstrate that these borders were well defined and maintained by the Assyrians themselves, but concurrently, that the driving forces behind a trader’s life on the road also meant for such borders to be expanded and reconstituted. Analyzing the Old Assyrian mercantile phenomenon through the vector of mobility enables us to better understand the ways in which the Old Assyrian merchants maintained a cohesive social identity and bounded community whilst working and living in “foreign” territories. Mobility is not an inherently disintegrating force, but shape the common cultural and political institutions which act as fibers binding communities together across great distances.

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