Archives of Old Assyrian Traders

Abstract

Abstract Thus far about 20,000 Old Assyrian cuneiform tablets have been unearthed at the site of the ancient city of Kanish, the modern ruin Kultepe in central Anatolia, most of which date to the nineteenth century bc. While a few dozen tablets were discovered on the city mound, both in houses and in the ruins of the palace of the local rulers, the bulk of the texts originate from the lower city, inhabited by local businessmen, craftsmen, and foreign, mainly Assyrian, traders. Since the tablets from the city mound, the scattered and largely unpublished remains of various small archives, defy archival analysis, I shall focus on those from the lower city. They were found in what the Assyrians called the kā rum, originally meaning ‘quay, harbour’ (in Mesopotamia, where bulk transport was waterborne), then also ‘commercial district’. Kā rum was used both as a topographical term—the name of the quarter where the traders lived—and as a designation of the organization of Assyrian traders settled there.

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