"12 Amorites, Elam, Yamhad, karum"

Mesopotamia was a place where people spoke many languages. It started with Sumerian, which was dominant in the south, and Akkadian, which was spoken more often in the center and north. The early people of Ebla in Syria spoke a language that we refer to as Eblaite. And there was also a large population of people in northern Syria who spoke a language called Hurrian. Akkadian and Eblaite were Semitic languages. But Sumerian and Hurrian were unrelated to Semitic, and unrelated to one another. Then, down from the Zagros Mountains, came the Gutians, who invaded at the end of the Akkadian Empire and spoke yet another language, as did the Elamites, who lived in what is now Iran, to the east. Almost all of these people adopted cuneiform as their writing system. This was a wedge-shaped script, usually written on clay tablets. They mostly expressed themselves in the dominant languages of Sumerian and Akkadian, though they also sometimes wrote texts in their own languages. It seems that the curriculum in scribal schools was similar everywhere, and very traditional. So scribes continued to learn Sumerian long after it was no longer spoken much at all. Cuneiform represented sounds and whole words, so it could be used, in theory anyway, to record just about any language. The fact that scribes who spoke other languages tended to write in Akkadian or Sumerian is probably because of their training, in the same way that monks of the medieval period wrote in Latin, even if they didn't speak it much. Also, there were challenges to writing down some languages in cuneiform. For example, some sounds aren't represented because they don't seem to have occurred in Akkadian, like the sounds of the letters O, F, J, and V. I sometimes teach the basics of cuneiform to middle school kids, and I have them try to write their names using the cuneiform script. Boys named Joseph face a challenge since three of the sounds in their names can't be written. The speakers of some ancient languages probably had similar difficulties when writing in cuneiform if they had different sounds in their words. Just like when we tried to write Chinese or Arabic words using the alphabet that we inherited from the Romans, they must have made compromises. Anyway, the point of this is that Mesopotamia was a big melting pot of people who came from different parts of the Near East and spoke different languages. Mesopotamia was a river valley with few natural boundaries, such as mountain ranges or coastlines, so it was always open to people migrating from other places. It had also always been very open to trade. There must have been tons of official translators, and plenty of people who were bilingual as well. Sometimes, when a new group showed up speaking an unknown language, they were viewed with suspicion at first, like the Gutians, who were even described in literary works as not quite human. But they almost always ended up settling down and becoming part of the culture, and often they took leading roles and headed new dynasties. Quite quickly, they stopped being viewed as foreigners and became part of the community. One of these new groups started showing up during the Ur III period in the late 3rd millennium BCE. And by the end of that dynasty, the kings of Ur seemed to have been increasingly worried about them. The new arrivals were called the Amorites. A high official wrote to one of the last Ur III kings, named Shusin, that He reminded the king of what he had been instructed to do. King Shusin did build a wall to keep the Amorites out, just as the official described. He named a year after this achievement. The wall might have been erected at the point where the Tigris and Euphrates flow closest together. But it doesn't seem to have been successful. Immigrants continued to move into Mesopotamia from different regions. The last king of the dynasty, Ibi-Sin, commemorated a military victory over the Amorites in one of his year names. He called it So who were the Amorites? A myth described them as being completely uncivilized. The Amorites who know no grain, no house nor town, the bores of the mountains. The Amorite who digs up truffles, who does not bend his knees to cultivate the land, who eats raw meat, who has no house during his lifetime, who is not buried after his death. As you can tell from this description, the Mesopotamians believed that the Amorites had started out as nomads rather than farmers, traveling seasonally with their sheep and goats. Scholars thought for some time that the conflict in the late Ur III period was a result of these nomadic Amorites wanting to settle in the agricultural lands of Mesopotamia. But this doesn't seem to have any basis in fact. There were some Amorites who were nomads, but there were others who seemed to have always lived in cities. The name Amorite just means people from the West. Their language also shows they were Western. Amorite was a West Semitic language, not East Semitic like Akkadian. Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic are also West Semitic languages, though those came later. Weirdly, the Amorites didn't write their language down much. Even though Amorite scribes learned to read and write, they always wrote in Akkadian and Sumerian. The way we know something about the grammar and vocabulary of their language is from their personal names. The names give us a sense of how Amorite was spoken, because everyone's name was a phrase. These were often about the gods. So someone's name might be Beloved of the God Dagan, or Gift of the Goddess Ninkarak. Amorite parents tended to give their children names that made sense in their own language. The Amorites were blamed by some later Mesopotamians for the end of the Ur III kingdom. But the real situation was much more complex. Even before any invasions, there was a famine that severely affected the kingdom. A later poem, lamenting the fate of Ur, put it this way. Enlil installed a pestilent famine in the city. He installed a city destroyer and a temple destroyer in the city. There was no beer in the brewery. There was no malt. There was no food for him, that's the king, in his palace. No grain filled his magnificent storehouse. He could not bear his life. Inflation seems to have skyrocketed, and people were desperate for food. A high official named Ishbi-Irra took advantage of the weakness of Ibi-Sin, the last Ur king. This official, Ishbi-Irra, stopped working for the king and set himself up as an independent leader in the southern city of Isin. Someone wrote about this to King Ibi-Sin, and we actually have this letter. It tells the king that the renegade official, Ishbi-Irra, believed he had been promised the kingship over the land by the god Enlil. And the god had also promised to remove King Ibi-Sin from power. The letter goes on to say, It was just as he, Ishbi-Irra, said. He captured Nippur. The land trembles like a reed fence from his clamor. Ishbi-Irra goes everywhere at the head of his troops. You can imagine how unnerving this must have been for King Ibi-Sin. All the signs suggested the gods were against him. The famine, Ishbi-Irra's success in breaking away and making his own little kingdom out of part of the kingdom of Ur. And then there were the increasing numbers of Amorites settling throughout the kingdom. And then around 2004 BCE, Ur was invaded, but not by the Amorites. Instead, the attack came from Elam to the east. First, the Elamites took over the city of Susa. This was an economic blow to the Ur III kingdom, since Susa and the lands in that eastern region were rich and important for the trade routes that flourished there. But even by then, the Ur III kings had already overextended themselves, and they'd broken important diplomatic ties. A few years later, the Elamites destroyed the capital of Ur and took poor Ibi-Sin as a hostage back to Elam. For a few years, the Elamites ruled Ur, but they were forced out in the end by Ishbi-Irra, that former official who had set up his own kingdom in Issin and who was so convinced that Enlil had wanted him to reign. So Ishbi-Irra did found his own dynasty in Issin, but he didn't control all of the territory that had been subject to the Ur III kings. Instead, it splintered into a number of smaller kingdoms. In some ways, the beneficiaries of the dissolution of the Ur III kingdom ended up being the Amorites, even though they weren't the ones who had caused it. The two centuries that followed the end of the Third Dynasty of Ur were full of wars. The new kingdoms each had a king who ruled from a major city and who was supported by a number of vassal kings in smaller cities. Their armies fought one another frequently. The various kings made alliances, broke them and made new alliances, only to break these too. Some of their vassals also switched sides on a regular basis, so some of the warfare was directed at bringing vassal kingdoms back into the fold. There's a well-known letter written around this time that sums up the situation. The letter was written by an official to the king of Mari, which was a kingdom along the Euphrates in eastern Syria. The official said, There is no king who is strong on his own. Hammurabi of Babylon has a following of ten or fifteen kings. Rimsin of Larsa, the same. Ibal-Piel of Eshnunna, the same. Amut-Piel of Katna, the same. And Yarim-Lim of Yamhad has a following of twenty kings. Add to that the ten or fifteen kings who followed the king of Mari, and that's between seventy and a hundred rulers in Mesopotamia during this time. Some of the vassal kings had very small domains, but each had sworn a treaty with his overlord. One of the six or seven major kings. And sent troops to support his overlord in times of war. And paid taxes as well. I'll spare you the details of the many wars that were fought. But during these turbulent times, people seem to have looked back on the Third Dynasty of Ur as a long-lost period of peace and comfort. Lamentations were written about the destruction of the great cities of Ur, Uruk, Nippur and Eridu that had happened at the end of the Ur III period. In these lamentations, the destruction wasn't blamed on the Elamite invaders. Instead, the people, as always, blamed the gods. And thought that the invaders had simply been carrying out the will of the gods. They even thought that the city god of Ur, the moon god Nanna, was responsible for the destruction. Nanna had abandoned his people. And that was why the Elamites had been successful. A lamentation about the destruction of Ur put it this way. Rebellion fell upon the land. Something which no one had known. It was something which had not been seen. Something unspeakable. Something that could not be grasped. All the lands were confounded in their fear. The gods of the city turned away. The shepherd fell away. Population breathed in fear. Right after the Ur III dynasty, the people might have thought that their civilization was coming to an end. Things must have been desperate. Maybe they told stories about the greatness of Ornama and Shulgi, and before them Sargon and Naram-Sin, and before them the mythical early dynastic king Gilgamesh, who perhaps lived around 2500 BCE. His reign was as far in the past to the people of 2000 BCE as Shakespeare and Elizabeth I are to us today. But we have the benefit of hindsight. And we know this wasn't an end at all. It was the prelude to a time of prosperity and renewed vitality known as the Old Babylonian period. During the era of widespread warfare that followed the Ur III period, many cities had new kings on the throne. Kings who founded new dynasties. And many of these dynasties were of Amorite descent. These Amorite kings were especially common in the center and northwest of Mesopotamia. One Amorite dynasty began to rule the previously unimportant city of Babylon. And successfully passed the throne from father to son for centuries. Among the kings of Babylon was the famous Hammurabi, who ruled from about 1792 to 1750 BCE. Other important kingdoms of the era were those mentioned in that letter I quoted a moment ago. Katna and Yamhad in the west, Mari in the northwest, Ekalatum in the northeast, Eshnunna in the east, and Issin and Larsa to the south of Babylon. These eight kingdoms were the squabbling successors to the third dynasty of Ur. Yamhad was the biggest of them. Its capital city was in Aleppo in the north of Syria near Turkey. Unfortunately, we don't know much about Yamhad because the archives of the royal court have never been discovered. They must be somewhere deep under modern Aleppo. Perhaps they'll never be recovered. Aleppo has been continuously occupied since ancient times. So the old Babylonian remains lie under the debris of all the intervening periods. The Neo-Assyrian Empire, the Persian Empire, Hellenistic Greek Empire of Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, the early Islamic period, and on and on right up to the present day. It's an odd fact, actually, that the sites best known for their archaeological finds weren't necessarily all that important in ancient times. And the cities that were really important, sometimes haven't even been found yet. Like Agade, the ancient capital of the Akkadian Empire. Or they're hidden under vast amounts of later remains like Aleppo. The way we tell the history of the old Babylonian period would probably be very different if we had more details about the kings of Yamhad and their administrations in Aleppo. All we know is the names of the kings and a little bit about their political history. On the other hand, we have a great deal of information about some Mesopotamian people from this era who weren't kings at all. One striking thing about the early second millennium BCE is that a lot more documents have been found in ancient private houses. For eras before the old Babylonian period, most of the documents were found in public buildings, such as palaces and temples. The tablets from private houses show us that people were able to run their own businesses and own their own houses and fields, much more than had been true in earlier periods. It seems also that a lot more people were able to read and maybe to write as well. It would still have been a very small percentage of the population, but these literate people didn't all work for the big institutions anymore, like the palace and the temple. One group of people who could read and write and who were entrepreneurial and who got rich were merchants. And one group of Mesopotamian merchants has left us an amazing record of their lives and their businesses. Weirdly enough, their records weren't found in Mesopotamia. They were found in Turkey. In the early 20th century, a number of cuneiform tablets began appearing on the worldwide antiquities market. They included letters that had clearly been written by merchants, and they were said to have been found in Turkey at the site of an ancient city called Kanes. Turkish archaeologists went to dig there, beginning in 1948, but their excavations uncovered no cuneiform tablets at all. Finally, a villager gave away the secret. The tablets that other villagers had found and sold hadn't come from the mound at all, but from a particular place in the fields nearby. The excavators turned their attention there. This area turned out to be a sort of suburb of the main city, a neighborhood of private houses. Its inhabitants called it the Karum. Karum usually meant harbor in Akkadian, but there was no river or waterway of any sort there. Harbors were centers for trade, and that was the meaning of Karum in this case. It was the place where merchants gathered and found customers. The surprising thing about these merchants of Kanes is that they weren't local to the area. They were from the city of Ashur, which is more than 800 miles away to the east on the Tigris River in northern Mesopotamia. So what were they doing there? Their tablets reflect the earliest known use of the cuneiform script in Anatolia, which is modern-day Turkey, but the Anatolians hadn't adopted it yet. The Assyrian merchants brought with them their habit of keeping records on clay tablets right along with the goods they carried to trade. Many houses in the Karum belonged to these Assyrian traders, and they kept their records stored in the houses, sometimes hundreds of documents in a single residence. For example, one house excavated in 1993 contained 178 letters, 69 loan contracts, 38 records of legal proceedings, and 102 personal accounts. In total, 17,700 tablets have come out of the excavations, and almost 5,000 more came from the site before the excavation started. These tablets give us a vivid picture of what life was like for an Assyrian merchant in the 20th and 19th centuries BCE. Unlike merchants of earlier times, these men weren't representing a temple, or a king, or any other major institution. The government of Ashur hadn't sent them, and the king seemed to have almost no control over them. Instead, the traders were organized as families, and these merchant families acted pretty much on their own. The merchants even drew up a treaty with the king of Qanish, a treaty that protected both parties and facilitated trade between them. This is a remarkable document. Most treaties were between two kings, but in this case, the Assyrian merchants represented themselves. The king of Ashur wasn't involved. The merchants were insured against theft. The king of Qanish pledged to replace stolen goods if a thief couldn't be found, but only if the merchant was willing to swear an oath that he'd been robbed. The king of Qanish had to swear that he wouldn't try to take their goods, or to force them to sell the goods cheaply to him. On the other hand, the merchants pledged to pay taxes to him, one-tenth of what they were selling. It seems to have been a good arrangement, and they all benefited. The Assyrians lived among the Anatolians with the blessing and support of the local king, and no violence seems to have been involved in the Assyrians' occupation in Qanish. The Assyrians didn't have to invade. They had goods for sale that the Anatolians really wanted, so they were welcome. The most desirable items they sold were tin and textiles. In exchange, the Anatolians had a ready supply of silver, which the Assyrians needed, because it had become the medium of exchange throughout Mesopotamia, and because there were no known mineral resources or metallures in Mesopotamia at the time. So this was how it worked. An Assyrian merchant family gathered together a shipment of textiles and tin in the city of Ashur. The textiles were not just everyday plain fabrics. They had to be particularly finely made, often by Babylonian women from south of Assyria, whose weaving was thought to be especially good. Plenty of letters exist documenting the efforts of merchants to find the very best textiles to take with them. The Assyrians paid the weavers for these textiles, though they paid much less, of course, than the goods were sold for. Some of them were made in the region of Ashur, but these weren't valued as much as the ones from areas of Mesopotamia further to the south. Of course, almost everyone in the Near East had access to wool, but not everyone had the same level of skill in spinning, dyeing, and weaving. The Mesopotamian weavers did something extraordinary. Maybe with colored designs or embroidery or the fineness of their weave, whatever their particular specialty was, it made their textiles incredibly sought after. Unfortunately, none of the textiles have survived, so we can't examine them to see what was so remarkable about them. But if you think about the value and quality of Persian carpets or Chinese silks or Navajo rugs in later times, you can get a sense of why the Anatolians wanted to buy them. The Assyrian merchants also bought tin from the mountain areas to the east and shipped it on to Anatolia. Tin was an essential component of bronze, so it was always needed. Again, the merchants were able to mark up the price and make a big profit by selling the tin in Anatolia. Fabric was transported in big rolls and the tin was formed into ingots. Both were loaded up onto the backs of black donkeys for the long overland journey. Sometimes, the merchant who was preparing to make the trip to Anatolia had borrowed money from a relative in order to buy the textiles and the tin, along with the donkeys he needed for his trading mission. That relative expected to be paid back and didn't expect to have to ask for the payment. There are a number of letters that survive in which the family member was put into the awkward position of calling out his brother or cousin for not paying his debts. This was considered to be rather rude, but sometimes it was necessary. So the donkeys were loaded with their goods and it was time to go. A caravan set off for Anatolia, taking two or three months to reach its destination, more than 800 miles away. This wasn't an easy journey. The merchants would pass along the northern reaches of the Mesopotamian river valleys and then up through a pass in the Taurus Mountains and onto the Anatolian plateau. Sometimes they would be robbed along the way. Sometimes they seemed to have tried to avoid paying taxes at checkpoints. Smuggling could land the men in prison, but they don't seem to have remained incarcerated for long. And in any event, they kept writing letters from prison, continuing to manage their businesses. When the merchants reached the city of Kanesh in Anatolia, they went first to the palace of the king so that he could pick out the textiles that he would take as his tax. Then they were free to join their family members in the karum, the trading quarter, and to begin to sell the rest of the shipment. Representatives of all the major trading families seemed to have lived year-round in the houses in the karum at Kanesh. Presumably, the visiting traders stayed in their relatives' houses. We can guess that this is true because letters found in the houses were often addressed to several different adult members of a family. Letters from home took almost as long to reach Anatolia as the caravans took to get there, so it wasn't possible to communicate quickly. One fascinating thing about the houses of the Anatolian merchants is that the design is exactly the same as what you see in the houses of the local Anatolian people at this time. Even the pottery found in the houses is the same. The archaeologists who excavated the site said that if it weren't for the cuneiform tablets, they wouldn't have had any idea that this neighborhood was home to a colony of expatriate Assyrians. So the Assyrians hadn't come to impose their culture. They were just long-term visitors, but some of them did marry Anatolian wives. Most Assyrian men had just one wife, but a trader living away from home was allowed to have two wives, one in each city, so long as the families were kept separate. The women of the merchant families were often very involved in trade. They didn't just do some of the weaving, they also helped run the business when their husbands were away. Not all the merchants stayed in Kanesh once they had arrived. Some of them went on to other towns and cities in Anatolia, selling their textiles and tin wherever they went. The silver that they were paid weighed very little, even though it was so valuable. They didn't need donkeys to ship the silver back home, so they sold the donkeys as well. The return journey to Ashur must have been faster and easier than the journey to get there. The silver acquired in Anatolia was then put to use in paying for business expenses and in buying a whole new shipment of goods to send back. And so this trading cycle continued over and over for more than a hundred years.