Turkey
Kültepe
Twenty-three thousand merchant tablets preserve Anatolia's earliest written record beneath a Bronze Age city.
Four thousand years ago, Assyrian merchants sat in this settlement and pressed cylinder seals into clay to authorise shipments of tin and textiles. The tablets survive, 23,000 of them, the earliest written records of Anatolia and the largest Old Assyrian archive ever found. The mound rises from the Kayseri plain, unremarkable until you understand what it contains.
Kültepe, ancient Kanesh, holds the largest archive of Old Assyrian cuneiform tablets ever discovered: more than 23,000 clay documents recording contracts, loans, debt notices and personal letters between Assyrian merchants and local Anatolians from roughly 2000 to 1750 BCE. The settlement ran as a karum, a trading colony binding Mesopotamia to Anatolia, and it is where written history begins for the whole peninsula. Excavations continue every season, still turning up tablets and seal impressions, while the Kayseri Archaeological Museum houses the major finds. The site is not dramatic; the idea is everything.
Solo
Kültepe is for the traveller obsessed with origins: standing where the first written contracts of Anatolia were sealed, where long-distance trade grew its paperwork. The site is not dramatic; the idea is everything.
- The site contained over 23,000 cuneiform tablets, the largest archive of Old Assyrian trade records ever found.
- The tablets record contracts, loans and letters between Assyrian merchants and local Anatolians.
- The karum of Kanesh, active around 2000 to 1750 BCE, tied Mesopotamia to Anatolia in written business.
- Excavations continue annually, and new tablets and seal impressions are still being uncovered.
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