Testing the middle ground in Assyro-Anatolian marriages of the kārum period

Central Anatolia in the Middle Bronze Age is marked by an extremely well-documented Assyrian presence during the kārum period (20th-mid 17th c. B.C.),1 a dynamic time of long-distance trade and cultural contact.2 Many Assyrians settled here on a permanent or semi-permanent basis, some marrying locals and raising children in their Anatolian homes, but also maintaining close contact with their home city of Aššur, following business interests and family affairs there. One of the idiosyncrasies of the social history of this period is a special bigamous arrangement which allowed Assyrian men to enter second marriages on the condition that one wife remained at home in Aššur, and the other in Anatolia. So far unattested for other contemporary or later Mesopotamian societies, this appears to be a custom peculiar to Old Assyrian society, designed to accommodate the needs of its travelling men (Michel 2006: 163). The potential role of Anatolian agency3 in the formation of this new custom, however, is seldom considered, despite numerous marriage contracts featuring mixed Assyro-Anatolian couples. This is partly due to the nature of the textual record, which offers very little of the kind of information one would require for reconstructing default conditions for Anatolian marriage practices, or gauging the extent to which these may have differed from Assyrian customs. While it is inevitable that discussions of kārum period marriage rely mostly on the Assyrian perspective, it would be a mistake to accord to it full explanatory capacity for how marriage practices took shape in mixed Assyro-Anatolian communities. Arguably certain aspects of long-distance bigamy cannot be explained as prioritising Assyrian needs, but instead suggest compromise. In other words, in generating a new legal mechanism of second marriages, Assyrians were not simply adapting to the logistics of long-distance life, but also to a new set of social expectations. As already noted by Lumsden (2008) and recently reiterated by Larsen and Lassen (2014), the nexus of intermarriage and cross-cultural compromise aligns Assyro- Anatolian marriage with R. White’s (2011) model of the ‘middle ground.’ This article tests the extent to which a middle ground may be recognisable in Assyro-Anatolian marriage practices, and how the peculiar terminology of bigamous arrangements can be interpreted as the crucial element of misunderstanding (White 2011) in middle ground formation

Factoids of Assyrian presence in Anatolia: towards a historiography of archaeological interpretation at Kültepe-Kaneš

This article offers a historiographical examination of how 20th-century ideas of assimilation and cultural purity have shaped our understanding of Bronze Age Anatolia, focusing on the canonical narrative of Assyrian presence at the site of Kültepe-Kaneš. According to this narrative, Old Assyrian merchants who lived and conducted business at Kaneš from the early 20th to the late 18th century BC left no trace in the archaeological record except for cuneiform tablets and cylinder seals, assimilating to local culture to such a degree that Kültepe’s archaeological record is entirely of Anatolian character. The accuracy of this view has met increasing circumspection in recent years. What remains to be articulated is why it remained unchallenged for so long, from its initial formulation in 1948 until the late 2000s, during which time it was widely repeated and reiterated. It is proposed here that the persistence and longevity of what is essentially a misconstrued notion of foreign (in)visibility in Kültepe’s material record can be explained by treating it as a ‘factoid’. The article first historicises the factoid’s formulation and subsequent development. This is followed by a critical evaluation of the evidentiary bases of the factoid to show how disciplinary tendencies to privilege certain categories of evidence over others have created artificial gaps in the data. Ultimately, the article seeks to highlight the epistemological implications of how one of the key sites of Bronze Age Anatolia came to represent a perceived rather than an observed case of indigenous cultural purity

Paraphernalia of funerary display at Kanesh: A closer look at gold eye- and mouth-pieces

The Hittite royal funerary ritual šalliš waštaiš prescribes gold pieces to be placed on the eyes and mouth of the deceased. This is consistent with the manner in which thin sheets of hammered gold are reported to have been found on the faces of occupants of in-house graves in the Lower Town of Kültepe, ancient Kaneš. Mouth-pieces of unmistakable similarity have also turned up in great numbers in Late Bronze Age graves on Cyprus, most notably at Enkomi. Beyond comparison with the šalliš waštaiš text, gold eye- and mouth-pieces from Kaneš have received little attention. This contribution offers the first comprehensive study of these objects specifically as a class of funerary paraphernalia. It provides a catalogue and typology of gold sheets, and explores their archaeological context before turning to their social and symbolic significance against the backdrop of both the cosmopolitan Kanešean households and a broader chronological and cultural setting. This discussion leads to the proposition to consider hybridity in terms of compatibility across different cultures

Anatolian empires: Local experiences from hittites to phrygians at Çadır Höyük

Çadır Höyük provides rich evidence for the endurance and transformation of specific cultural features and phenomena at a rural center on the Anatolian plateau as it experienced the waxing and waning of control by imperial political powers of the Bronze and Iron Ages. Especially evident during those periods of imperial power is the construction and maintenance of public architecture; certain economic activities also shift in their importance at those times. Simultaneously, continuity in economic and social organization is also a feature stretching across times of imperial control and its loss. Examination of the archaeological evidence from Çadır Höyük suggests that nothing is as continuous, nor as discontinuous, as it might seem