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The Kültepe Tablets and the First Written Documents of Anatolia

The written history of Anatolia begins in a merchants' quarter.

Radar TürkiyeRadar Türkiye4 Kasım 2026
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The Kültepe Tablets and the First Written Documents of Anatolia

The written history of Anatolia begins in a merchants' quarter. At Kültepe, northeast of Kayseri, in the lower town of the place once called Kaniş, Assyrian merchants kept archives of clay tablets in the back rooms of their houses some four thousand years ago. Made up of letters, contracts, records of debt and court rulings, these archives are the earliest known written documents of Anatolia. At the request of Türkiye, UNESCO added them to the Memory of the World International Register in 2015. This article is not about the mound itself but about the tablets. We look at the answers official and academic sources give to a few questions: who wrote them, what they wrote, how they were kept and where they can be seen today.

The birth of a trade network

The text published by the Kayseri Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism, which bears the signature of the Kültepe excavation director Prof. Dr. Fikri Kulakoğlu, starts the story in Assyria. The Assyrian kingdom won its independence towards the end of the third millennium BC. Soon afterwards King Erišum I reformed trade; the state monopoly was lifted and commerce was left to firms set up by members of families. In this way a strong and widespread trade network was established between northern Mesopotamia and Anatolia in the first quarter of the second millennium BC. The Assyrians opened trading centres called karum in the capitals of local kingdoms or in important towns. The word means harbour, but here it meant a market for goods that arrived not by water but by caravan.

The documents found at Kültepe name about forty settlements where Assyrian merchants stayed or set up markets. According to the directorate's text, the location of only two of them is known for certain: Kaniş at Kültepe and Hattuš at Boğazköy. Kaniş was the capital of the whole system; in administrative terms the karums of Anatolia answered to Kaniş, and Kaniş answered directly to Assur. One important detail is that the Assyrians had no political or military superiority over the local kingdoms. The two sides lived together through agreements based on mutual economic benefit.

Caravans and goods

The tablets describe in detail how this trade worked. According to the directorate's text, merchants setting out from Assur crossed the Tigris and Khabur valleys with caravans of two hundred to two hundred and fifty laden donkeys and reached Central Anatolia. The goods brought to Kaniş were distributed from there into the interior of Anatolia. The trade rested on metals and textiles. Tin, which was not found in Anatolia, and cloth woven in Assur were brought in, and silver and gold were taken in return. Where the tin came from is not known; the text says it most probably came from further east, from Turkmenistan or Afghanistan. The tablets also tell us that wool bought raw in Anatolia was woven in Assur and sold back to Anatolia. Copper, leather and jewellery were also part of this network.

This trade was not without rules. Merchants registered with the system, paid a fixed charge, and agreed not to smuggle and to pay their taxes in full. The local palace undertook to keep the merchants safe on the roads, and in return it set out their residence permits and tax rates in writing. Rights and limits such as a ban on trading certain luxury goods, or the right of Assyrians to be tried under their own law, are also written in the tablets. At the head of the whole order stood an institution called the bit karim. This centre in Kaniş worked like a chamber of commerce and also collected taxes. Merchants paid a bridge crossing tax and a deposit tax here. The institution also acted as arbiter in disputes between merchants.

The language and form of the tablets

The Kültepe tablets are written in cuneiform script and in the Old Assyrian language. The project website of the Kültepe excavation stresses that Anatolia learned writing from Mesopotamia in this period and that the history of Anatolia begins here. Letters were placed inside envelopes of baked clay, and the envelope was sealed. According to the directorate's text, in the earlier level the envelopes were sealed with cylinder seals, in the later level with cylinder or stamp seals, and towards the end of the age only the tablets themselves were sealed. The lumps of clay tied to the packaging of goods that needed protection are also mostly inscribed and sealed.

The seals also show the cosmopolitan face of the city. The excavation website writes that the cylinder seals fall into four styles: Old Babylonian, Old Assyrian, Old Syrian and Old Anatolian. The presence of these four styles side by side in the same archives is one of the most concrete proofs that people speaking different languages lived together in Kaniş.

What the tablets tell us

Kültür Portalı describes the tablets as letters, contracts and agreements, most of them economic in content, which show the political and legal relations of the period. The excavation website opens up the subjects a little further: besides the details of trade there are loans, interest, marriage and divorce, inheritance, court rulings and correspondence with local rulers. A smaller number are literary texts and school exercises. The UNESCO register page also says that the archives document trade in great detail while also describing the daily life of the families and their dealings with the local population.

One of the most surprising aspects of the tablets is what they reveal about social life. According to the directorate's text, the documents show that the native people of Anatolia had a social structure different from that of Mesopotamia. Women took part in business and in government, and married women made contracts in their own names and sealed them. Marriage and divorce contracts were based on mutual agreement; divorce required a court ruling and either party could apply to the court. Couples had equal rights over their property. Many debt notes were sealed jointly by husband and wife. The texts also document the customs of engagement and adoption. We also learn from these tablets that Assyrian merchants who lived far from home for long periods followed local custom when they married local women.

The archive rooms

The tablets did not come from a palace library but from private houses. According to the directorate's text, merchants' houses in the karum of Kaniş were brought to light with their full plans and the objects inside them. In these houses small locked and sealed archive rooms were kept apart from the storerooms holding goods for sale. The tablets were stored in pots, wooden chests, mats and sacks or on wooden shelves, sorted by subject. The city suffered several fires; according to the text, one of the great fires took place around 1835 BC, in the reign of the Assyrian king Naram-Sin.

The discovery of the tablets

According to Kültür Portalı, the cuneiform documents known as the Cappadocian tablets, which spread to the museums of the world and to antiquities markets, began to appear in the second half of the 19th century. For a long time, however, the exact spot they came from could not be found. According to the excavation website, E. Chantre dug in 1893 and 1894, and H. Winckler and H. Grothe in 1906, but they could not find the place where the tablets came from. The spot was discovered in 1925 by the Czech linguist B. Hrozný; the tablets came not from the mound but from the lower town around it, that is, from the karum. The directorate's text also recalls that these early excavations, and the digging of the mound for soil, left almost a third of the site unusable. Scientific excavations began in 1948 on behalf of the Turkish Historical Society under the direction of Prof. Dr. Tahsin Özgüç, and they continue today with a team led by Prof. Dr. Fikri Kulakoğlu.

The Memory of the World inscription

On UNESCO's Memory of the World page the inscription appears under the name The Old Assyrian Merchant Archives of Kültepe. The page states that the archives consist of about 23,500 tablets and form a textual corpus unique in world history. The nomination was submitted by Türkiye in 2014 and the inscription took place in 2015. The page lists the document type of the inscription as manuscripts and stresses that the archives record in detail the commercial and private dealings of the merchant families and their relations with the local population.

Where to see them today

According to Kültür Portalı, the finds from the Kültepe excavations are displayed above all in the Kayseri Archaeological Museum, and also in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara and the Istanbul Archaeological Museums. According to the page of the Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism, the Kayseri Archaeological Museum was moved inside Kayseri Castle in a reorganisation carried out in 2019 and displays its works in chronological order. In the city, this is the first place to go to see the tablets. At the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara the works are shown in halls arranged by period, and the Assyrian Trade Colonies Age is one of them. Looking at the seals, vessels and metal objects of the period in this hall makes it easier to imagine the world in which the archives were kept.

The place where the tablets were found can also be visited. Kültür Portalı writes that the archaeological site is 24 kilometres from the city centre. You can reach it by taking a minibus or bus heading towards Sivas from the eastern bus station, getting off at the Kültepe junction and walking about two kilometres.

Tips for your visit

The best way to understand the tablets is to go to the museum first and then to the site. After seeing the size of a tablet, an envelope and a seal impression up close in the museum, walking along the stone paved streets of the lower town makes it concrete in which houses those small pieces of clay were written. The cuneiform on the surface of the tablets is very small; give yourself some time in front of the display case and look closely at the seal impressions on the envelopes. During the excavation season work may be under way at the site; check the current visiting conditions of the museum and the site on the official websites of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism before you go. If you would like to end your trip at the museum inside Kayseri Castle, the castle walls and the Seljuk buildings of the city centre are easy to add to the same walk.

Sources

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