The material remains and the more than 23,500 cuneiform tablets unearthed at the site of Kultepe (ancient Kanesh) shed light on social, political, and economic aspects of the Middle Bronze age (ca. 2000-1700 years BC) in central Anatolia, but also in Upper Mesopotamia. The rich textual record provides ample information on a very sophisticated supraregional market economy, representing one of the best-documented historical cases of long-distance trade in the ancient world. Although the site was first excavated in 1893, followed by intermittent excavations between 1906 and 2005, modern scientific and interdisciplinary excavations have only been undertaken since 2006. The new scientific research at Kultepe-Kanesh has already begun amassing new data and providing us with a unique opportunity to generate new perspectives and to challenge previous models and assumptions about, for example, trade, colonialism, ethnicity, art, religious ideas, identity, and patterns of social, political, and economic organization in the Near East during the Middle Bronze Age. A primary goal of this special volume is to integrate the work of scholars in archaeology, archaeometry, bioarchaeology, geoarchaeology, and history to develop a new synthetic research paradigm for investigating issues of trade, colonialism, ethnicity, art, identity, and urbanization in the Near East in a unified fashion.

This fourth volume in a collection based on the biennial interdisciplinary meetings held in Kultepe, ancient Kane, draws together sixteen contributions that explore the archaeology and history of this site, with the ongoing aim of taking a holistic approach to revitalizing this important early Anatolian cultural centre. The papers gathered here present both current research and recent important results derived from research in Kultepe and its wider surroundings through four key thematic strands: cultural exchanges between this site and its environs; material culture; sealings, writings, and history; comparisons with other sites across Central Anatolia. Through this approach, this volume is able to explore not only the historical importance of Kultepe, but also to highlight the settlement's future importance as a pilot site for interdisciplinary studies, thanks to its unique textual and archaeological data.

This book presents a detailed description of the political, cultural, and economic world of ancient Kanesh (present-day Kültepe, Turkey), a vibrant Bronze Age Anatolian trade outpost and the earliest attested commercial society in world history.

The eleven contributions in this book address the history of contacts and exchanges in the Bronze and Iron Ages within West Asia, extending far beyond the boundaries of the previously defined contact zone of the ‘Ancient Near East’.

Archives are considered to be collections of administrative, legal, commercial and other records or the actual place where they are located. They have become ubiquitous in the modern world, but emerged not much later than the invention of writing. Following Foucault, who first used the word archive in a metaphorical sense as "the general system of the formation and transformation of statements" in his "Archaeology of Knowledge" (1969), postmodern theorists have tried to exploit the potential of this concept and initiated the "archival turn". In recent years, however, archives have attracted the attention of anthropologists and historians of different denominations regarding them as historical objects and "grounding" them again in real institutions. The papers in this volume explore the complex topic of the archive in a historical, systematic and comparative context and view it in the broader context of manuscript cultures by addressing questions like how, by whom and for which purpose were archival records produced, and if they differ from literary manuscripts regarding materials, formats, and producers (scribes).