Inferring Social Rank in an Old Assyrian Trade Network

In the early 20th century, the attention of Assyriologists and archaeologists was directed to a number of cuneiform tablets coming from a remote archaeological tell in Kültepe, Turkey. After the first series of excavations, archaeologists discovered a large collection of texts and the remains of a Bronze Age trade colony, referred to in the texts as kārum Kaneš. Once these initial ca. 5,000 texts were deciphered, the field of Old Assyrian studies was born. In 1948 official Turkish excavations began at Kültepe and added over 17,000 tablets to the Old Assyrian text corpus, which now totals ca. 23,000 cuneiform tablets [5]. These texts document the intricacies of thriving Bronze Age trade networks, comprised of Old Assyrian merchants from the ancient city of Assur approximately 4,000 years ago (ca. 1950-1750 BCE) [1]. The texts further show how the merchants acted as the middle-men in a large series of inter-connected networks which, among other things, linked the natural resources of tin (in Iran and Afghanistan) and copper (in Turkey) in order to produce bronze in Anatolia.