Archaeology Magazine - November/December 2023 - 43

A lead mold depicts an
Anatolian divine couple
A
A
with their children. It
includes one of the rare
w
in
d
depictions of a woman
found at Kanesh.
o
Though archaeologists
do not know what
T
d
these Anatolians called
themselves,
traders
worshipped gods and
tr
called
w
goddesses distinct from those celebrated in Mesopotamian
cities. Centuries later, the Indo-European language they
spoke would be known as the " language of Kanesh "
throughout the Hittite Empire, which dominated Anatolia
from about 1600 to 1200 b.c.
The royal couple of Kanesh ruled a strategic area where
nearby mines provided copper that could be smelted with tin
imported from the east to make bronze. As traders led caravans
of donkeys packed with wares between cities, the king
and queen of Kanesh collected taxes and tribute that helped
fund the construction and maintenance of a massive citadel
within the city walls. Excavations of a lower town outside the
walls have revealed that Anatolian shopkeepers and families
of workers lived there alongside Assyrian traders, whose
settlement in Kanesh served as the center of commerce for
the entire region. This is where the vast majority of tablets
from Kanesh have been uncovered.
These tablets reflect a time in which literacy was becoming
widespread among Assyrian traders. They used a type
of relatively uncomplicated script, known as Old Assyrian
cuneiform, characterized by simplified symbols that each
represent a syllable or a whole word. Only around 120 distinct
characters were used on the tablets found in
Kanesh, which likely made it easier for people
without formal schooling to learn on their own.
" It's very simple writing, " Michel says. " Some
of the letters I'm reading, they're written so
poorly, it tells me this person has just learned
on the spot and figured out how to write. "
The bulk of the tablets from Kanesh can be
dated to between approximately 1900 and 1840
b.c. The sheer volume of the texts has allowed
Assyriologists to reconstruct the business,
religious, and personal lives of several families
over the course of about three generations in
minute detail. Zizizi's father, Imdi-ilum, for
instance, appears to have lived in Kanesh for
some time. In his private archives discovered
there, archaeologists found a letter from two of
his sisters at home in Assur. They chided him
for neglecting his religious duties to Ashur, the
archaeology.org
Assyrian
them
the Nuwau. They had
their own culture and
chief god of the Assyrian pantheon and the namesake of Assur.
" We consulted the women dream interpreters, the women
diviners, and the spirits of the dead, " the sisters wrote. " Ashur
keeps on warning you; you love money so much that you
despise your own life! "
Imdi-ilum's sisters were probably concerned for his physical
safety as well. Like many merchants, Imdi-ilum and his sons
used smuggling routes through the mountains to transport
tin and textiles to Anatolian markets. Other merchants wrote
about paying bribes to avoid taxes, or even hiding metal ingots
in their underwear. When caught by authorities in Kanesh, the
merchants could face stiff cash penalties and house arrest. They
could even serve jail time.
Some letters written by Assyrian women describe heartbreak.
In one message, a woman named Ummi-Ishara wrote
to her sister Shalimma, who had left her husband and children
to visit their mother in Kanesh-and refused to return,
abandoning her family in Assur. Ummi-Ishara wrote that
she feared she would be turned out of her brother-in-law's
home if Shalimma remained in Kanesh. Shalimma's husband
had grown despondent after sending her several letters that
went unanswered, Ummi-Ishara warned. " For five days he
did not go out of his home, " her sister pressed. " Write me
if you are looking for another husband, so I know it. If not,
then get ready and leave for here. "
L
ike the angry letter Zizizi's parents sent her, many
of the texts addressed to or written by women deal
in some way with the production of textiles, one of
the most lucrative goods Assyrians traded with Anatolians.
Together with the enslaved people who lived in their
households, women in Assur wove large textiles that their
male relatives sold in Kanesh.
Michel has worked with researchers at the Center for Textile
Research in Copenhagen to conduct experiments using
replicas of ancient weaving tools uncovered at Kanesh, such as
the whorl of a drop spindle, to determine how long it would
have taken Assyrian weavers to make each
textile. Tablets record that the standard
size of textiles sold in Kanesh
t
d
was approximately 13 by 15 feet.
Each one would have required
w
E
more than 22 miles of thread.
The team determined that spinm
T
n
h
m
p
e
A
o
is
ning
the raw wool alone would
have taken as much as
three
months of full-time labor for one
person. Next, Assyrian weavers
would have woven strips of
A tablet found in the archive
of the merchant Puzur-Assur
is a copy of a letter he sent to a
woman named Waqqurtum, in
markets of Kanesh.
w
im
m
43
which he offered advice on how to
improve sales of her textiles in the
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Archaeology Magazine - November/December 2023

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