Women and Real Estate in the Old Assyrian Texts

Michel, Cécile

doi:10.5356/orient.51.83

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…Each of these archival groups contains all the tablets accumulated during the lifetime of one or more members of a family. These vary a great deal in terms of their size and content (Michel 2003;2006;2011a;2015c).…”

Section: The Archives and Their Ownersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Constitution, Contents, Filing and Use of Private Archives: The Case of Old Assyrian Archives (nineteenth century BCE)

2018

Manuscripts and Archives

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The archives of the ancient Near East do not correspond to a collection of cuneiform tablets preserved for their historical value, but more to a set of texts all kept in the same place, concerning the same individuals or dealing with the same topics. They were accumulated as long as they were considered to be useful. Besides uncovering official archives used by large organisations (palaces and temples), archaeologists have also excavated many private archives; these belonged to individuals and were found in their houses. Assyrian merchants' archives unearthed at Kültepe (the ancient town of Kaneš) in Central Anatolia represent the first important group of private cuneiform archives and they mainly date back to the nineteenth century BCE. These archives consist of letters, legal texts and memoranda. They were arranged on shelves or inside labelled containers using a classification system that gives us hints about the use merchants made of their archives. For more than three millennia, populations of the ancient Near East used cuneiform script to write down all types of texts, whatever the purpose, be it administrative, official, scholarly or private, for example. Cuneiform signs could be engraved on stone, metal or wax spread on wooden or (in exceptional cases) ivory tablets. However, the vast majority of texts in cuneiform script were impressed on fresh clay. Unbaked clay tablets were the standard vehicle of writing; clay was one of the most durable materials of antiquity. As a matter of fact, hundreds of thousands of clay tablets have been unearthed at sites all over the Near East, from central Anatolia to Iran, and to Egypt and Bahrain. Found in palaces, temples and private houses and arranged in specific rooms or areas of buildings, some groups of cuneiform tablets have been referred to as 'libraries', while the great majority of them are now known as 'archives'. The archives' content varies according to the type of building in which they were found. This paper focuses on private archives that once belonged to Assyrian merchants and were unearthed in their houses in the lower town of Kaneš (modern-day Kültepe in Central Anatolia). The content of these archives gives us information about their historical context and allows us to study their constitution. As an example, the analysis of the tablets excavated in 1993 has provided us with data about their owners, the filing systems employed for tablets and what such archives were used for.

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Section: The Archives and Their Ownersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Constitution, Contents, Filing and Use of Private Archives: The Case of Old Assyrian Archives (nineteenth century BCE)

2018

Manuscripts and Archives

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“…In the second half of the 18 th century the Khabur Triangle once again became a patchwork of several small city-states characterized by fluid and ambiguous borders (Eidem 2000 andRistvet 2008). In central Anatolia, most written sources (c. 22,500 clay tablets) come from the archaeological site of Kültepe and a little more than one hundred from other sites in central Turkey such as Bögazköy (72 texts), Alişar Höyük (63), Kaman Kalehöyük (2), and Kayalıpınar (1; see Michel 2003Michel , 2006Michel and 2011. The textual evidence reveal that central Anatolia was balkanised into several independent city-states distributed in five different zones (Barjamovic 2011): the Middle Euphrates (Nehria, Batna, Zalpa, Uršu, Hahhum, Mamma); the territory within the Kızılırmak basin (Kaneš, Amkuwa, Samuha); Konya plain (Purušhaddum, Ulama, Wahšušana, Šalatuwar); the Halys region (Hattuš, Karahna, Durhumit) and the Pontus (Zalpuwa).…”

Section: Case Studies and Historical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Confronting scales of settlement hierarchy in state-level societies: Upper Mesopotamia and Central Anatolia in the Middle Bronze Age

Palmisano

2017

Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports

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In this article, I adopt a long-established method known as rank-size analysis to detect particular settlement patterns in the Khabur Triangle (KT) and central Anatolia (CA) during the Middle Bronze Age. Archaeologists must be particularly careful when applying rank-size analysis to a given study area as the results can change at a different spatial scale. With these premises in mind, in this work, I first show the results produced by performing rank-size analyses on the two whole study areas and assess comparatively any difference in the observed patterns between them. Second, I break down each study area into smaller window analyses in order to detect how settlement size distributions change at a more local scale. The results show that at a larger regional scale, both central Anatolia and the Khabur Triangle in the Middle Bronze Age are characterized by fragmented politically landscapes of competing independent polities loosely integrated. By contrast, at smaller local scales central Anatolia and the Khabur Triangle show a different picture. In central Anatolia settlement systems appear more nucleated in large centres dominating their surrounding rural hinterlands and strong political and economic centralization is evident at Kültepe and Boğazköy. On the other hand, in the Khabur Triangle settlement primacy is less accentuated and the polities are more loosely integrated. These examples demonstrate the advantage of using rank size analysis at different spatial scales for having a complete understanding of the dynamics behind the observed empirical data.

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“…For a general overview of the Old Assyrian trade in Anatolia, seeMichel (2001Michel ( , 2008a andVeenhof (2010a).3 For a general bibliography of the Old Assyrian period and a catalogue of the Old Assyrian sources, seeMichel ( , 2006aMichel ( , 2011a.4 Larsen (1967),Michel (2001: 171-301). 5;Veenhof (1999).…”

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confidence: 99%

Weighing Units and Weights in the Context of Trade Between Upper Mesopotamia and Anatolia (Nineteenth and Eighteenth Centuries BCE)

Michel

2022

Why the Sciences of the Ancient World Matter

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HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

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Women and Real Estate in the Old Assyrian Texts

Cited by 4 publications

References 1 publication

Constitution, Contents, Filing and Use of Private Archives: The Case of Old Assyrian Archives (nineteenth century BCE)

Constitution, Contents, Filing and Use of Private Archives: The Case of Old Assyrian Archives (nineteenth century BCE)

Confronting scales of settlement hierarchy in state-level societies: Upper Mesopotamia and Central Anatolia in the Middle Bronze Age

Weighing Units and Weights in the Context of Trade Between Upper Mesopotamia and Anatolia (Nineteenth and Eighteenth Centuries BCE)

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