Everything (or most everything) You Ever Wanted to Know About the Assyrian Trading Colonies!
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| R's breakfast |
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| Me and mine! |
The site of Kültepe, where we visited today, was the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Kanesh and the center of a complex network of Assyrian trade colonies in the 2nd millennium BC. It is located 20 km to the northeast of Kayseri and occupies a position at which historic and natural routes, leading from Sivas in the northeast and Malatya in the southeast, converge. This naturally advantageous position allowed Kültepe to emerge as a key center of culture and commerce between Anatolia, Syria, and Mesopotamia (primarily the city-state of Ashur) by the end of the 3rd millennium BC.
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| Arial view of the mound site |
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| View of the various trade routes (from the visitor center) |
The site is composed of two parts, an upper mound, which was the Palace, temple and noble area, and a separate lower town, or Karum, which housed the Assyrians as well as other local traders.
Excavations revealed that the Upper Mound was inhabited from the earliest phase of the Early Bronze Age, to the end of the Roman Period. What is really exciting about this portion of the site is that it is still being actively excavated (during the summer months, as students and faculty are in school in the winter months). But the signs are everywhere, and it’s amazing to see how much has been done since our last visit here about 7 years ago.
The Lower Town, which the Assyrians called the Karum (literally, “quay”), surrounds the Mound. The Karum is the part of the site where foreign and native traders lived and conducted business and was inhabited for approximately 300 years.
Soon after the north Mesopotamian city of Ashur established itself as an independent state at the end of the 3rd millennium BC., King Erishum I launched a series of trade reforms in order to secure the future of his kingdom. He lifted the state monopoly on trade, thereby allowing long-distance commerce to be carried out by private individuals operating within ‘family firms.’ This, in turn, led to the creation of a highly complex and wide-reaching trade network into Anatolia. The center of this network was the ancient city of Kanesh, from which incoming Assyrian goods were redistributed further into Anatolia. The scope and sophistication of the commercial trade network in the Bronze Age is amazing. The movement of goods and materials over long distances is impressive. For example, the area that is now Turkey had copper but no tin needed to make bronze, so tin was imported from places like Crete. Other materials – gold, silver, textiles – moved along these routes, as well.
Archaeological excavations at the site have uncovered a series of highly important monumental administrative structures as well as residential neighborhoods.
There were stone-paved streets (with subterranean drainage channels) and open spaces separating individual neighborhoods. Houses with mud-brick walls rising on stone foundations and supported by timber beams ranged from small, two-roomed structures to larger complexes of six or more rooms; most houses had two stories. Constructed in local Anatolian manner, the houses were closely built.
The most incredible thing about the Assyrian Trading Colony, though, is that it brought the very first writing into Anatolia! There had been no writing at all here prior to that time! With a vast repertoire of tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets unearthed from the individual Assyrian trader’s houses in ongoing excavations since 1948, Kültepe is a site of utmost importance for Anatolian archaeology. The private archives of the Karum residents have yielded 23,500 clay tablets and envelopes to date. These are the earliest written documents which illustrated the ancient Anatolian history. Life, society and economy at this site, even the family affairs and personal relationships of its inhabitants, were recorded on clay tablets in the Old Assyrian dialect of the Akkadian language using the cuneiform (wedge-shaped) script, the knowledge of which came into Anatolia with Assyrian merchants.
Unlike royal or temple archives discovered in other ancient centers, the cuneiform archives of Kültepe-Kaneshrepresent the single largest body of private texts in the ancient Near East. They were kept in archive rooms, neatly arranged inside clay vessels, wooden chests, wicker baskets or sacks. The fire which eventually destroyed the city must have started suddenly, as the excavations revealed many documents were still in their envelopes, before the merchants could dispatch their recently written letters or open those newly received.
Photo/notes from Visitor Center; Note tablet is within its "envelope" 
What the cuneiform tablet actually talks about! 
Now that would hold a lot of wine...
Our first stop was at the Visitor Center, which was really excellent. It was very modern in form, with working computer displays in both Turkish and English, and a great deal of information not only about the site, but about the history of Turkish archaeology in general. From there, to the “Mound” or Palace/Temple area first.
Up a long hill to the top. There was some signage in English, which was helpful, but it wasn’t that easy to really “see” what we were looking at … as R sometimes says … “a pile of stones??” But as I noted earlier, it is definitely under excavation, so who knows how it will look in the upcoming years! Rather fortunately for us, while there were a few other cars stopped there, we basically had the site to ourselves!
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| Looking out over the Palace and Temple site |
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| Large area of current excavation |
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| Rendering of what the temple may have looked like! |
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| A lot of stones ... but they had to start somewhere! |
From there, it was just across the street to the Karum, and the Assyrian Trading Colony. Here, it was more than a trifle odd! Firstly, right next to the parking area, was a large area of what looked like rebuild mud-brick buildings, with straw or hay on the top … R thinks it’s supposed to be representative of what the community would have looked like in ancient times! But there wasn’t one word to say, really, what it was, and nothing was inside the empty, dark buildings, and I couldn’t find anything on-line … so we just kept walking, as I remembered from our past visit, there had been excavations to look at!
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| No idea what these are about, unless they are replicas? |
So – surfaced out from behind the odd buildings, and voila! Excavations! The most wonderful thing was that they actually had left one story of one house open, and it was amazing to look inside it! You can even see charred posts from what looked like may have been the fire that originally burned down the colony thousands of years ago! As Robert said, you could really imagine the people living there and carrying out the family business! Although as it took anywhere from 2-3 months to make the 1,000 km journey from Ashur to Kanesh– not to mention the danger from bandits and thieves – not sure how many trips I’d like to have taken along that route, for sure!
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| Lower floor of Assyrian house |
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| Note charred timbers |
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| Map of Karum |
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| Robert on bench! |
By this time, it was getting on for 2 pm, and we decided to head back to town. I had hoped to fit in the archaeological museum today but had forgotten about it being Monday – and in certain parts of Turkiye (and the world, actually) many museums (including all that I can find in Kayseri) are closed on Monday! So, will have to wait for a later trip for that one!
Another long slog back to find our hotel once again … it’s not easy, but again, we managed it! Apparently, once you get to the back gate, you’re supposed to call the Hotel and ask them to open the gate … but as we didn’t know, we had to take a very circuitous route around, once again, to get here. Will not regret heading to a Hilton DoubleTree in Sanliurfa tomorrow, that’s for sure! I KNOW I can find that easily, as it’s something like 10 stories tall!
Still thinking about what to do for dinner tonight …
So, more later!
Much love,
m
xxx
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