“Make Them Pay”: Charting the Social Topography of an Old Assyrian Caravan Cycle By Edward P Stratford

https://www.academia.edu/7674748/_Make_Them_Pay_Charting_the_Social_Topography_of_an_Old_Assyrian_Caravan_Cycle With one foot on the Tigris and the other on the Anatolian plateau, Assyrian merchants conducted a brisk trade in tin, textiles, and silver in the late twentieth and early nineteenth centuries BCE. 1 The structural aspects of the shipment and sale of tin and textiles in exchange for silver in caravan cycles have been the subjects of many excellent studies with methodologies including lexical studies and text-type studies. 2 In addition, archival studies have been helpful in giving a sense of the variety of organization and involvement in the trade among different individuals. 3 However, approaches that focus on structural activities like transporting, or on archives spanning a generation of activity, inevitably sublimate the context of merchants' short-term interests-interests that drove the creation and retention of the surviving documents. This is particularly so with the richest group of documents from the Old Assyrian trade, namely, the business letters sent between coordinating merchants scattered throughout the locales of the trade. Like most cuneiform missives, the Old Assyrian letters were not explicitly dated and few contain references that permit them to be secured confidently in the chronology of a merchant's life or in relation to other letters. As a result, many letters must often be read for structural patterns of the trade or as anecdotes, connecting most directly to recognizable contours of the human condition. Some correspondence can be recognized as pieces of a particular epistolary conversation. Such conversations are most easily recognized when the circumstances are 1. This article represents a revised section of my dissertation and of a paper read at the 220th Meeting of the American Oriental Society Conference, (St. Louis, Missouri), 12 March 2010. I would like to thank Mogens Trolle Larsen, Martha Roth, Seth Richardson, Gojko Barjamovic, and Thomas Hertel for their comments and criticism during the preparation of those earlier works. I also thank my reviewers for their helpful suggestions. Of course, I bear responsibility for any errors that persist. Abbreviations are cited according to the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary except for: Adana = tablets in the collection of Adana Archaeological Muesum; AKT = Ankara Kültepe Tabletleri; KEL = Kültepe Eponym List; kt a/k, kt b/k … kt 94/k = tablets from the excavations at Kültepe; LAPO = Littératures du Proche-Orient ancien; OAA/S = Old Assyrian Archives/Studies; OBO = Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis; PIHANS = Publications de l'Institut historique-archéologique neérlandais de Stamboul; POAT = Pennsylvania Old Assyrian Texts; TC = Tablettes cappadociennes (TCL 4 = TC 1; TCL 14 = TC 2; TCL 19 -21 = TC 3); TPAK = Tablettes paléo-assyriennes de Kültepe; TTC = Trente tablettes cappadociennes; VS = Vorderasiatische Schriftdenkmäler; WAG = tablets in the collection of the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore. ...