The Archives of Old Assyrian Traders: their Nature, Functions and Use

This contribution deals with the archives of Old Assyrian traders (originating from the city-state of Assur on the Tigris) from the first centuries of the second millennium BC, found in their houses in the lower town of the ancient Anatolian city of Kanesh, which is excavated since 1948 by Turkish archaeologists. The now more than 23.000 cuneiform tablets discovered there, belonging to at least 60 different merchants’ archives, constitute the most detailed and extensive written evidence on overland trade before the early Middle Ages. After providing general information on the traders, their business and their archives (kept in sealed “strong-rooms”), a more detailed analysis is preceded (§ 2) by distinguishing the various situations in which traders lived and worked in Kanesh – seniors or young men, with or without their family, some also with a house in another trading town in Anatolia - and the impact this had on their relations with their mother-city and on the nature and number of written records in their archives. In § 3 a brief sketch is given of the self-governing, corporate Assyrian merchant community, called “kārum Kanesh” (its location and archives have not yet been discovered), run by its main members. As an extension of the government of the city of Assur and head of the colonial network in Anatolia it played a vital role in performing administrative (it kept accounts, organized general accounting sessions and could impose rules), commercial (organizing collective operations and dealing with the local palace and ruler) and judicial tasks (as court of law), whose impact on the activities of the traders is reflected by their archives. In § 4 the three main categories into which the records may be distinguished are described: a large variety of letters, legal documents (contracts and judicial records) and memorandums, lists and short notes, whose functions the long § 5 analyzes. Three functions, which may overlap, are distinguished. Firstly (§ 5.1) as means of communication, mainly by letters, essential for the success of the caravan system and the contacts between people - relatives, business partners, authorities - in Assur and the colonies, notably with personnel and relatives traveling or temporarily settled elsewhere in Anatolia. Secondly (§ 5.2) as aid to memory, letters, testimonies, memorandums and lists, to keep track of the many, often complex and valuable transactions, especially investments and credit operations, to monitor due dates and dun defaulting debtors. And thirdly (§ 5.3) as evidence, especially “valid” records, that is those in sealed envelopes, both contracts and agreements and a variety of usually sworn depositions and testimonies, which resulted from and were used in private summonses, mediation, arbitration or formal lawsuits. The latter could take place in kārum Kanesh and in Assur, before the City Assembly, headed by the ruler of Assur, which resulted in verdicts and official letters. Credit operations in particular generated many evidentiary records, most of them in order to provide creditors with various securities and specific facilities, such as a “payment contract” (with a defaulting debtor) and a kind of “bearer’s cheques”. Paragraph 6 investigates the role of “copies” and “duplicates”, both of letters and “valid records”, made to serve multiple addressees of letters, to provide business partners and co-witnesses with essential data (e.g. to dun defaulting debtors and to prepare for lawsuits), and to keep evidence available when originals were sent overland. The final § 7 analyzes the various ways in which records were classified, by subject matter, persons involved, the nature of the texts (e.g. letters, debt-notes, and sealed or unsealed records), and stored in the archives. This was usually on shelves along the walls or in various types of frequently sealed containers (wooden boxes, baskets, leather bags and jars) or as sealed packets, whose contents could be identified by inscribed bullae that served as labels. Letters of absent traders who ask wives or friends to retrieve records from their archives and write about the transport of groups of tablets provide interesting information. Unfortunately the archaeological record about the discovery of the tablets usually is too general, because their exact find-spots and numbers are rarely mentioned, which makes it impossible to distinguish valid, current records, from old files, no longer in use and possibly stored in jars. The informative value of the bullae, often separated from the tablets to which they belonged and published separately, is also not exploited. The resulting picture, mainly based on the textual information, shows a rather practical way of classification in various types of easily distinguishable groups and files in different “containers”, but many details remain unclear

Mesopotamia: The Old Assyrian Period

The first part by Klaas Veenhof "The Old Assyrian Period" is a critical overview of our knowledge of and at the same time an introduction to the study of the Old Assyrian Period (first two centuries of the 2nd mill. B.C.), as we know it from discoveries in ancient Assur and in particular from the cuneiform archives of the Old Assyrian traders living in an commercial colony (called karum) in the lower town of ancient Kanesh (modern Kültepe) in Central Anatolia. The first chapters establish what "Old Assyrian" is and analyze the chronology and the available sources (material and written). There follows a critical sketch of the publications of and research on the Old Assyrian sources, subdivided in a dozen thematic studies. After a sketch of Old Assyrian history, follows an overview of "the Old Anatolian scene", which deals with the cities, local rulers and the about 40 Old Assyrian commercial settlements in Northern Mesopotamia and Anatolia. A special chapter analyzes the important Old Assyrian commercial treaties. The contribution ends with a detailed presentation of the Anatolian titles and officials and the religious festivals and agricultural seasons that figure as terms of payments in Anatolian debt-notes. The second part by Jesper Eidem "Apum: A Kingdom on the Old Assyrian Route" summarises recent evidence for the history of northern Syria during the period contemporary with the late phase of the Old Assyrian trade. To the detailed study of the sources an Appendix of important texts is added. The book is fully indexed (subjects, texts, geographical names, kings and rulers, gods and temples, persons, Assyrian words) and contains a extensive bibliography