Register, Assyrian Merchant Colonies

The Old Assyrian Merchant Archives of Kültepe.

The Old Assyrian Merchant Archives of consist of 23,500 tablets from Kültepe and constitute a unique textual corpus in world history. In the first quarter of the 2nd Millennium B.C., almost 4,000 years ago, a community of about 900 traders and their families came from the city-state of Assur, modern-day Iraq, and settled in the central Anatolian city of Kanesh, now the archaeological site of Kültepe in Turkey. Their trade is documented in great detail through the Archives, alongside the daily intricacies of their families and their commercial and private dealings with the local population. The Archives allow us to write a dense social and commercial history incomparable to anything else known from the ancient world.