Kültepe

The ground here is soft underfoot, a pale, dusty earth that crumbles at the edge of every path. Wind moves across the open plain without much to stop it. To the south, on a clear day, the snowy cone of Mount Erciyes rises above the flat farmland. Around you are low walls of stone and dried mud, laid out in neat rectangles. They look modest. But you are standing in one of the places where written history in Anatolia begins.

This is Kültepe, a name that means "ash hill" in Turkish. In the Bronze Age, the city here was called Kanesh, and also Nesha. It sat on the trade routes of central Anatolia, the great high plateau that forms the heart of modern Turkey. The site lies a short drive northeast of the city of Kayseri. Today it looks quiet and rural, with fields and a village nearby. Four thousand years ago, it was a crowded commercial city.

The site has two main parts, and it helps to know which one you are looking at. The first is the large mound, the höyük, which rises above the plain. This was the upper city, with palaces, temples and the homes of local rulers. The second part spreads out around the base of the mound. This was the lower town. Here the merchants lived, worked and stored their goods.

Those merchants are the real surprise of Kültepe. Many of them were not local. They came from Assur, a city on the river Tigris in what is now northern Iraq, far to the southeast. In the early second millennium before Christ, Assyrian traders set up a permanent trading community here. Scholars use the ancient word kārum for it, which means something like "harbour" or "trading quarter". Kanesh was the centre of a whole network of these Assyrian trading posts across Anatolia.

What did they trade? Mainly tin and textiles. Tin was essential for making bronze, the most important metal of the age. Fine woollen cloth came from Assur, much of it woven by the merchants' own families back home. Donkey caravans carried these goods across mountains and rivers. The journey took weeks. In return, the merchants sent silver and gold back to Assur. It was, in many ways, an early form of international business.

We know all this because of clay. Archaeologists working here have found tens of thousands of clay tablets, written in cuneiform, the wedge-shaped script of ancient Mesopotamia. The language is an early form of Assyrian. These tablets are the oldest written documents ever found in Anatolia. Before them, the history of this land was silent. With them, we can hear individual voices.

And the voices are remarkably ordinary. The tablets are mostly letters, contracts, loans, receipts and legal records. Merchants complain about late payments. Wives in Assur write to husbands in Kanesh about money, family and the cloth they have woven. There are disputes over debts and arrangements for marriages. Many tablets were sealed inside clay envelopes, like letters today, to protect the message. Reading them, you sense people very much like us — worried about prices, family and trust.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. The tablets were not found in a royal library or a temple archive. Most came from private houses in the lower town. The merchants kept their business papers at home, often stored in jars or in small rooms. So when you look at those foundations in the lower town, you are looking at the remains of family offices. Archives of business correspondence once sat inside these walls.

Kültepe also matters for a second reason, and this one surprises many people. Later in the Bronze Age, the Hittites became the great power of Anatolia. They spoke an Indo-European language, related distantly to English, Greek and Persian. But the Hittites did not call their own language "Hittite". They called it Nesili — the language of Nesha. That is the same city as Kanesh. The name of this hill lives on in what we know of the oldest written Indo-European language.

The story of the site's discovery has its own twists. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tablets from Kültepe began appearing on the antiquities market. Nobody outside the area knew where they came from. In the 1920s, the Czech scholar Bedřich Hrozný identified the lower town as the source. Systematic Turkish excavations began in 1948, led for many decades by the archaeologist Tahsin Özgüç. Work has continued since then, and the site still produces new finds.

As you walk, look at how the buildings were made. The walls stand on foundations of stone, and above them the builders used mudbrick. Wooden beams once strengthened the walls. In many places, the lower town was destroyed by fire, and then rebuilt. That burning, in a strange way, helped preserve the tablets, because fire bakes clay hard. The ash in the soil may be part of why this hill has its name.

The objects from Kültepe are not displayed here on the open site. Many are in the Kayseri Archaeology Museum, and important pieces are in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara. Among them are elegant pottery vessels with long, beak-like spouts, and drinking cups shaped like animals. There are small figurines, cylinder seals and, of course, the tablets themselves. If you have time, seeing them in a museum completes the picture of the streets you are walking now.

Before you leave, pause for a moment on higher ground and look out across the plain. The same flat land once carried caravans of donkeys, loaded with tin and bales of cloth. The same mountain stood on the horizon. The walls at your feet are low and quiet now. But somewhere in this soil, people once pressed reeds into wet clay to send news home. As you walk back, listen to the wind across the fields — and remember the letters that waited here for four thousand years.