Kültepe Totally Explained

Everything about Kanesh totally explained

Kültepe is the name of the modern village near the ancient city of Kaneš in central eastern Anatolia. The nearest modern city is Kayseri, about 20 km southwest.

Archaeology of Kültepe

Kültepe has been successfully excavated by the late Professor Tahsin Özgüç since 1948 until his death in 2005.

Level IV-III. Little excavation has been done for these levels, which represent the site's first habitation. No writing is attested, and archaeologists assume that both levels' inhabitants were illiterate.

Level II, 1974 BCE - 1836 BCE (Mesopotamian Middle Chronology according to Veenhof). Craftsmen of this time and place specialised in earthen drinking vessels in the shape of animals, often for religious rituals. During this period, Assyrian merchants established themselves in a merchant colony (kârum) attached to the city, which was by now called "Kaneš". Bullae of Naram-Sin of Akkad have been found toward the end of this level (Ozkan 1993). This level was burned to the ground.

Level Ib, 1798 BCE - 1740 BCE. After an interval of abandonment, the city was rebuilt over the ruins of the old, and again became a prosperous trade center. This trade was under the control of Ishme-Dagan, who was put in control of Assur when his father, Shamshi-Adad I conquered Ekallatum and Assur. However, the colony was again destroyed by fire.

Level Ia. The city was reinhabited, but the Assyrian colony was no longer inhabited. The culture was early Hittite. Its name in Hittite became "Kaneša", but was more commonly contracted to "Neša". Some attribute Level II's burning to the conquest of the city of Assur by the kings of Eshnunna; but Bryce blames it on the raid of Uhna. Some attribute Level Ib's burning to the fall of Assur to other nearby kings and eventually to Hammurabi of Babylon.

Kaneš

The city's name Kaneš is popularly transliterated as "Kanesh" because of the way Hittite was recorded in cuneiform, but the scholarly literature prefers "Kaneš" so as not to confuse the "sh" sound with a "s"-"h" double consonant.

Kârum Kaneš

The quarter of the city of most interest to historians is the Kârum Kaneš, "merchant-colony city of Kaneš" in Assyrian (rendered Karum Kaniş in Turkish). During the Bronze Age in this region, the Kârum was a portion of the city set aside by local officials for the early Assyrian merchants to use without paying taxes, as long as the goods remained inside the kârum. The term kârum means "port" in Akkadian, the lingua franca of the time, although it was extended to refer to any trading colony whether it bordered water or not.
   Several other cities in Anatolia also had kârum, but the largest was Kaneš. This important kârum was inhabited by merchants from Assyria for hundreds of years, who traded local tin and wool for luxury items, foodstuffs and spices, and, woven fabrics from the Assyrian homeland and from Elam.
   The remains of the kârum form a large circular mound 500m in diameter and about 20m above the plain (a Tell). The kârum settlement site is the result of several superposed stratigraphic periods. New buildings were constructed on top of the remains of the earlier periods, thus there's a deep stratigraphy from prehistoric times to the early Hittite period.
   The kârum was destroyed by fire at the end of both levels II and Ib. The inhabitants left most of their possessions behind to be found by modern archaeologists.
   The findings have included enormous numbers of baked clay tablets, some that were enclosed in clay envelopes stamped using cylinder seals. The documents record common activities such as trade and legal arrangements. They record trade between the Assyrian colony and the city-state of Assur, as well as trade between Assyrian merchants and local people. The trade was run by families, not by the state of Assyria. These Kültepe texts are the oldest written documents from Anatolia. Although they're written in Old Assyrian, the Hittite loanwords and names in these texts are the oldest record of any Indo-European language (see also Ishara). Most of the archaeological evidence found is typical of Anatolia rather than Assyria, but the use of cuneiform writing as well as the dialect are the best indications of Assyrian presence.

Kaneša

The king of Zalpuwa, Uhna, raided Kanes; after which the Zalpuwans carried off the city's "Sius" idol. The king of Kussara, Pithana, conquered Level Ia Neša "in the night, by force"; but "did not do evil to anyone in it".
Neša revolted against the rule of Pithana's son Anitta, but Anitta quashed the revolt and made Neša his capital. Anitta further invaded Zalpuwa, took its king Huzziya captive, and recovered the Sius idol for Neša. (External Link

) In the 1600s BCE, Anitta's descendents moved their capital to Hattusa (which Anitta had cursed); thus founding the line of Hittite kings. These people named their language Nešili, for example "the language of Neša".

Dating

At Level II, the destruction was so total that no wood survived for dendrochronologists Newton and Kuniholm as of December 2003, who therefore concentrated on the rest of the city (which was built centuries earlier). Level Ib provided to them more wood. In particular the dendrochronologists date the bulk of the building of the Waršama Sarayi to 1832 BCE with further refurbishments up to 1779. (External Link

) But Keenan has treated that paper's conclusion critically: (External Link

)

Detailed information has also been published for the site of Kültepe [Kuniholm& Newton, 1989; Newton, 2004: app.2]. The investigators, however, no longer claim to have a date for this site that's near reliable; for example, Newton & Kuniholm [2004] say that the date “should be thought of as tentative, subject to … modification”—indeed, their t-score is only 4.1. (The tentative match is actually just the best that could be found within the date range allowed by radiocarbon ages: this isn't a valid basis for dating, as discussed in Section 8; furthermore, the radiocarbon ages are internally inconsistent and are unlikely to have the accuracy assumed.)

Further Information

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