The Assyrian merchant colonies
Private traders run donkey caravans between Assur and Anatolia, and leave their letters behind.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 200 years
- Known to
- ± 50 years
- Era
- Bronze Age, Holocene
From around 1950 BCE Assyrian merchants establish a trading colony at Kanesh in central Anatolia, exchanging tin and textiles for silver and gold. Some 23,000 clay tablets from their houses survive: contracts, partnerships, loans, complaints about debts, and letters between husbands abroad and wives running the business at home. It is the most detailed picture of commercial life anywhere in the ancient world, and much of it is unmistakably ordinary.