Volume 35, Issue 1

The phenomenon of “displaced” tablets is assessed, i.e. tablets that came to light during the regular excavations at Kültepe/Kaneš but were either in antiquity or in the process of the excavation “displaced” and were not found or stored in their original archival context. Three texts that refer to persons or events known from other published sources (such as the famous Syrian text kt k/k 4) are edited for the first time, adding valuable new information to known events.

Two hitherto unpublished Old Assyrian tablets from the excavations at Kültepe/Kaneš in 1950 (kt c/k 922 and kt c/k 944) are introduced. Both name the well-attested city of Luhusattia and the Balīhi -area in connection with the wool trade of the family of Ennānum, the son of Abīya, found in published tablets from the irregular excavations before 1948. It is shown that the toponym Balīhi refers to an urban centre associated with the river of the same name rather than a town in Anatolia.

The 891 tablets, envelopes and fragments, and 37 bullae discovered during the 1993 season over Kültepe′s site were found in two neighbouring houses. They belong to three or four generations of the same merchant family. The study of this archive, still in progress, allows to reconstruct the family tree, to understand which kind of text was preserved and how the documents were classified.The main owner of the archive, Aššur-taklāku, son of Alāhum, grand-son of Iddin-Sîn, was active during about twenty years in Kaniš. The archives cover the middle of the second half of kārum level II and they end before the destruction of this level.

Several aspects of the alimentation of the Anatolians and the Assyrian merchants as found in texts from Kültepe/Kaneš are elucidated, the role of grain and meat in the local economy forming the primary focus. Grain as the object of debts and a means of exchange, the role of foodstuffs in promissory notes as well as Assyrian meat consumption, the access to food for the merchants and Assyrian usage of grain are also discussed.

The Kültepe lists of year-eponyms (KEL) are the most important sources for Old Assyrian Chronology, and a new example of these texts is published here. Unlike the known copies of KEL, the new text (kt 01/k 207 = KEL G) starts at a point some 28 years before the end of Kārum Kaneš level II and covers nearly the whole of the later Old Assyrian period, preserving the names of 143 eponyms in all. New insights on the gap between levels II and Ib of Kārum Kaneš are laid out, and much new data from unpublished texts from level Ib are made known, together with useful concordances of KEL A and G along with the Mari Eponym Chronicle.

A new Old Assyrian incantation against the evil eye ( ēnum lamuttum ) is published here, adding to the steadily increasing number of such texts. Parallels to Old Babylonian examples are provided, and in the context of a discussion of the religious life and practice of the Old Assyrian merchants, other new texts from Kültepe with previously unattested gods and information concerning a private chapel are presented.