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Ancient Kanesh: A Merchant Colony in Bronze Age Anatolia, by Mogens Trolle Larsen
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The ancient Anatolian city of Kanesh (present-day Kültepe, Turkey) was a continuously inhabited site from the early Bronze Age through Roman times. The city flourished ca. 2000-1750 BCE as an Old Assyrian trade outpost and the earliest attested commercial society in world history. More than 23,000 elaborate clay tablets from private merchant houses provide a detailed description of a system of long-distance trade that reached from central Asia to the Black Sea region and the Aegean. The texts record common activities such as trade between Kanesh and the city state of Assur and between Assyrian merchants and local people. The tablets tell us about the economy as well as culture, language, religion, and private lives of individuals we can identify by name, occupation, and sometimes even personality. This book presents an in-depth account of this vibrant Bronze Age Anatolian society, revealing the daily lives of its inhabitants.
- Sales Rank: #1104833 in Books
- Published on: 2015-09-21
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.98" h x .87" w x 5.98" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 342 pages
Review
"In [this] beautifully detailed new book ... we meet dozens of the traders of Kanesh and their relatives back home in Assur. Larsen has been able to construct family trees, detailing how siblings and cousins, parents and spouses, traded with one another and often worked against one another."
Adam Davidson, The New York Times Magazine
About the Author
Mogens Trolle Larsen is Emeritus Professor of Assyriology at the University of Copenhagen. He has written books and articles on Assyriology and archaeology, and has edited a number of volumes. His book, The Conquest of Assyria: Excavations in an Antique Land, was published in 1996. He is a member of the American Philosophical Society, Academia Europea, and the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.
Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Expensive, but a superb example of how detailed analysis can enlighten our understanding of history
By Michael Sandman
Given the high price and esoteric subject matter of this book, it's not surprising that there aren't m(any) reviews as of Jan. 2016. It's too bad that the price is so high, because the book would be interesting to a moderate number of general readers with an interest in micro-history, the process of building up our understanding of the past by using the details of ordinary life. I'm a general reader, not an academician with a speciality in the ancient Near East, and I never would have sprung for it myself. My wife bought it for me after I read her an excerpt published in a NY Times review.
Science and the ability to quickly and inexpensively extract analysis from large amounts of data has made it possible to recalibrate our view of history by looking at details. Bone analysis tells us where people lived based on the isotopes preserved in their bones form the water they drank. DNA tells us when one tribe or people moved into contact with another and produced mutual offspring. Dating the rings on trees makes it possible to date buildings constructed with wood beams. Using a computer to cross-reference known events like eclipses and the reigns of monarchs with documents such as letters, lists of items in a caravan or ship, and IOUs from an early era make it possible to set the chronology of the events recounted in the documents, including events that were not momentous except perhaps to the individuals who left the documents. Computers applied to linguistics helps trace the migration of people who spoke a given language. If you're a history geek, this is a wonderful time to be alive, and it's going to get better and better.
"Ancient Kanesh" is a foretaste of how much better history is going to get. It is a reconstruction of the life and times of a merchants' colony of Assyrians who originated in Iraq and who lived 600 miles to the north, in central Anatolia, not all that far from the capital of Turkey. It uses an analysis of thousands of clay tablets left behind by those merchants to trace their commerce, but it also traces their family lives and sheds some light on their societies. (For example, the names of some of their daughters are recorded in a way that indicates they may have had a role outside the narrowest confines of the home.) Because of the volume of clay tablets -- more than 10,000 in the database in the author's university -- and the slow process of translating them from Old Assyrian, this analysis a work in progress. It's been going on in universities for perhaps 150 years, but it's really taken off in the last few decades, partly because of the tools that science and computers have given to historians.
The author is a Dane who studied at the University of Chicago and for some reason was attracted to the tiny sub-speciality of Old Assyria. He's written a book that seems to be a capstone to his long career of studying life in 2000 to 1500 BCE. He's drawn many, many conclusions but has the good sense to draw them somewhat tentatively, recognizing that new material plus the translation and publication of already discovered material will mean his conclusions need to be modified. And he's non-dogmatic. At one point he comments that there are competing chronologies of events that differ by a few decades, but that when you're looking back 4,000 years, it doesn't really matter much that you're working with a margin of error of +/- 30 years. If he takes pride in anything, its pride in his modesty and common sense, which is sometimes missing among academics who have done landmark research in a narrow academic field.
One thing he does take a stand on is his conclusion that contrary to what some historians and economists have speculated, there was a robust market economy in commodities like tin and textiles. We've been brought up (or at least I have) to think that the economies of Mesopotamian and Egyptian kingdoms were command economies. The center collected grain as taxes and redistributed it as a way of obtaining services. And the central authority set the rate of exchange between grain and other products. That may be true for grain, but Professor Larsen demonstrates that there was a robust trade from Asur in northern Iraq up into Anatolia and that traders were in business to make a profit, and that the rate of exchange between the commodities they traded fluctuated. In fact it was the fluctuations that gave the traders an opportunity to make a profit through arbitrage. He might also have pointed out that there was substantial trade between regions -- from Mesopotamia into Iran and along the Persian Gulf coast down to Oman, at the very least. It seems very unlike that "international" trade in a wide range of both raw materials and man-made objects could have been subjected to the centralized control of a command economy, although the trade could certainly have been taxed by the central authority.
The writing is somewhat dense and quite detailed, and there are a few things that could have been explained better for the sake of general readers. For example, the concept of eponyms -- who were selected to run the affairs of Kanesh annually for a year, rather like Roman consuls -- should have been explained early in the book, not 100+ pages in. But anyone who's sufficiently interested in getting into this kind of detailed history will be able to get through it because Professor Larsen has done such a good job providing perspective. With that perspective, we can visualize in our minds the activities of the people who left the commercial, legal and family documents in the form of those thousands of clay tablets. Moreover, we can recognize ourselves. For example, a commercial disruption that seems analogous to the 2008 financial crisis may have overtaken the Assyrian merchants in Kanesh almost 4000 years ago. The Biblical prophet Jeremiah warns against the power of the Assyrian Empire 1100 years later, and one surprise for me learn that Asur, the mother city of Kanesh and linked in my mind to Assyria, was just a trading city in 1800 BCE. The book's hypotheses about how the city was run and the way its trading colonies were managed uses the analysis of thousands of clay tablets found in Kanesh. The structure of this trading colony bears more than a passing resemblance to the merchants' colonies of the Middle Ages and the settlements of European merchants in the Far East.
All in all, this is an intelligent and well-written piece of historical analysis of an ancient merchant society that looks pretty familiar in surprising ways.
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