The Middle Bronze Age in Anatolia: the Assyrian Colony period

The frame

The Met timeline page "Anatolia and the Caucasus, 2000-1000 B.C." dates the Middle Bronze Age to about 2000-1600 BCE, and the "Assyrian Trading Colony period" to about 1950-1750 BCE. According to its overview, precious metals such as silver, gold and tin attract merchants to the Anatolian plateau, particularly from the northern Mesopotamian city of Ashur; these merchants establish trading centres (karum), such as the one at Kanesh, modern Kültepe, and the details of their transactions are documented in cuneiform tablets, which the source calls the earliest texts found in the region. According to the key events, their presence is known primarily from the large number of clay tablets recording the transactions and the correspondence with the merchants at home in Assyria. Source 1.

Boundaries and overlaps

The colony period covers about two hundred of the row's four hundred years, and begins some fifty years after the row does. The "Hittite Old Kingdom", which the source dates about 1680-1450 BCE, also begins within the row: its start still belongs to the Middle Bronze Age, most of it to the Late Bronze Age. According to the key events, Hattusha, the capital of the Hittite empire, was also founded within the row, about 1650 BCE. The site does not move the 1600 BCE limit because of this, nor does it split the kingdom between the two rows; the two facts should be read together. Source 1.

On this site

Two items are linked to this row. "Cuneiform tablet and case: quittance for a loan in silver" is a tablet and its sealed case in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose record assigns them to the Old Assyrian Trading Colony period and attributes them "probably" to Kültepe; the page separates what the record states from what it infers. The article on trade between Assur and Kanesh, written for the Mesopotamia chapters, deals with the same network and the written traces its transactions left, and is linked to this row as well.