Kultepe (Kanesh)

Bronze Age City Of Kanesh With The Assyrian Merchant Colony (Karum) Beneath It; Source Of Some 23,000 Old Assyrian Cuneiform Tablets, The Oldest Written Records In Anatolia. On The UNESCO Tentative List · Kayseri, Kayseri

Around four thousand years ago merchants from Assur, eight hundred kilometres away in what is now Iraq, set up a trading colony outside the Anatolian city of Kanesh and ran a long-distance business in tin, textiles and silver out of it for two centuries. They kept their records on clay, in cuneiform, and when the colony burned the tablets baked and survived - some twenty-three thousand of them, which makes this the oldest archive in Anatolia and one of the most detailed commercial records from anywhere in the ancient world. They are not royal inscriptions. They are contracts, loans, partnership agreements, complaints about late payment, and letters between merchants and their wives back in Assur, several of whom were running the business at the other end. What you see at Kultepe is a mound and the excavated foundations of the merchant quarter below it. The tablets are in Ankara and Kayseri.

Karahoyuk Koyu, Kultepe Oren Yeri, Kocasinan, Kayseri, Kayseri, Turkiye

Open daily with longer summer hours and an earlier winter close. Excavation has run here for decades and sections close during the season. There is little shelter on the mound or in the karum area below it. No useful public transport. Check whether the site museum arrangements have changed before travelling.

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