Kültepe, a pilot site for cross-disciplinary research

23 November 2015

The archaeologists and Assyriologists whose work is focused on the ancient Near East have for many years seen their terrain ravished by death and destruction. The former have returned to Iran or invested their time in Iraqi Kurdistan; the latter, specialists in cuneiform texts, concentrate their research activities in the museums and collections located in Europe and the United States.

Turkey remains one of the few countries in the Near East that is still accessible to researchers, which therefore makes it possible to combine field studies with the study of ancient texts.

In the heart of Central Anatolia, 12 km to the northeast of Kayseri, lies the site of Kültepe, the modern name for the ancient town of Kaneš, which was inhabited, amongst others, by Assyrian merchants at the beginning of the second century BCE Excavations have been carried out at the site from 1948 onwards. Since 2006 and the arrival of F. Kulakoğlu (a professor at the University of Ankara) as the Director of Excavations, the numerous specialists whose paths cross at the site represent a range of disciplines: archaeology, history, philology, anthropology, ceramology, archaeozoology, palynology, geophysics, geomorphology, archaeometallurgy, dendrochronology, and so on.

On the tell (i.e. mound), the archaeologists initially unearthed a vast Anatolian palace dating from the eighteenth century BCE (the Warshama Palace), as well as various official and private buildings. Since 2009, they have been excavating an even older monumental public structure, dating from the second half of the third millennium BCE, the largest identified (to date) in Anatolia for this early period. In the Lower Town, occupied at the beginning of the second millennium BCE, some formerly densely inhabited areas have been excavated, turning up a wealth of household furnishings and some 22,500 cuneiform tablets inscribed in ancient Assyrian: letters, legal documents, accounting records and personal notes and lists. This makes the site one of the largest sources of cuneiform tablets in the entire Near East. These texts provide details of commercial exchanges organised by the Assyrians between their city of origin, Aššur, in the north of Iraq, and Kaneš. The tablets provide evidence of a harmonious relationship between the inhabitants of Anatolia — of Hittite or Hurrian origin — and the Assyrian merchants who had long been established there. The tablets constitute the first private archives of substantial size that have come down to us.

A series of letters sent by women from Aššur, addressed to their relations who had settled in Anatolia, along with some family contracts, provide us with some unique insights into their daily lives, as well as into Assyrian society. These women wove some fine quality fabrics that were exported to Anatolia by their brothers and spouses, in exchange for money. In addition to the texts, the site at Kültepe has yielded a number of imprints that various materials left in clay (textiles, basketwork, wood, etc.); seals or their impressions depicting scenes in miniature; tools which bear witness to the various forms of agricultural and artisanal work; and the remains of workshops (textile, metalwork, pottery, etc). Therefore, this site makes it possible to combine in an exceptional way the study of texts with multiple aspects of material culture, making it without a doubt the most compelling archaeological ‘laboratory’ in the entire Near East. For a number of years now, an international team has been conducting an investigation into textile manufacture, uniting archaeological artefacts and textual data with archaeological experimentation and ethnographical research in Cappadocia. The results obtained up to the present have made it possible to reconstruct the annual production of a group of women inhabiting a household at Aššur, and to calculate that, thanks to their profits, every year these women were able to generate the equivalent monetary value of a small dwelling.

Since the summer of 2013, the researchers have met every two years on the ancient site to describe the work they have done. This biennial exchange of information is part of an international gathering called the Kültepe International Meeting (KIM). This year, the second KIM took place at the end of July. For several days, some intensive scientific conversations were conducted among specialists originating from all four corners of the planet. The setting was truly unique: directly on the site, in front of the ruins of an ancient dwelling, the archaeologists and historians recreated the daily lives of the ancient Assyrian and Anatolian inhabitants, as revealed by their archives unearthed from one or more locations. They were also able to assign a name to some human remains interred in a grave dug into the soil underlying a former room, and to reconstruct the family’s culinary habits, thanks to the discovery of animal bone fragments and charred grain.

Four thousand years ago, Kaneš was a multicultural place where Anatolians and Assyrians lived together in harmony; today it is a meeting place for scientists and scholars originating from all over the world, and very fertile terrain where it is possible to carry out important experimental research.