History

Kanesh was already a thriving Anatolian city by the Early Bronze Age (c. 2500 BCE) when it appears in the regional record as a major urban centre of central Anatolia. Around 2000 BCE, merchants from the Assyrian city of Aššur (modern Qal’at Sherqat, Iraq) began establishing a permanent trading colony — the kārum — adjacent to the city mound. The kārum system was a sophisticated commercial institution: the word kārum originally referred to a riverside quay or trading dock, and by extension to a quarter where foreign merchants lived and worked under the protection of the host city, subject to its laws and to their own internal kārum assembly.

At Kanesh, the kārum operated in two main phases (Level II, c. 1975–1835 BCE, and Level Ib, c. 1800–1750 BCE) separated by a destruction episode. During these phases, Assyrian merchants transported tin (sourced possibly from Afghanistan or the Iranian plateau) and luxury textiles (produced by women in Aššur) westward by donkey caravan along a route of approximately 1,200 kilometres to Kanesh, where they were exchanged for gold and silver to be sent back to Aššur. The merchants maintained permanent households in the kārum, married locally, and raised families there over multiple generations.

The tablets they used to administer this trade — written on clay in cuneiform script, sealed in clay envelopes, and stored in private archives in their houses — survived because the houses were destroyed by fire, which baked the clay. The texts include trade agreements specifying prices and delivery schedules; business letters addressed between partners and family members; loan contracts with interest rates (including compound interest, the oldest known examples); marriage and adoption contracts; and records of commercial disputes adjudicated by the kārum assembly. Among the correspondents is Lamassī, a merchant’s wife whose letters to her absent husband describing the difficulties of managing the household in Aššur are the oldest known private letters written by a woman.

The tablets also contain the earliest written evidence of the Hittite language: Anatolian personal names — belonging to local rulers, trading partners, and employees of the Assyrian merchants — appear in the Old Assyrian documents as clearly non-Semitic names belonging to the ancestral language group that would develop into Hittite, Luwian, and Palaic. Kültepe/Kanesh is therefore the entry point of the Hittites into written history.

The kārum came to an end around 1750 BCE following a period of political disruption in Assyria and Anatolia. Kanesh itself continued to be inhabited, and the site preserves evidence of Hittite-era and later occupation, but the great archive period was over. The tell was first investigated by European travellers in the nineteenth century; the first scientific excavation was conducted by Bedřich Hrozný (famous for deciphering Hittite) in 1925. Systematic annual excavation began in 1948 under Tahsin Özgüç and has continued under his successors.