Trade being the main theme of this Rencontre, I thought it of some interest to give some reflections on the theme from a general view-point, notably on the role of trade in connection with the diffusion of civilization and on trade as a factor in the economy of ancient Mesopotamia, in short trade as a cultural and an economic factor, and a possible connection between these two. Did trade play an important role in the diffusion of features of civilization in ancient Mesopotamia and surrounding countries? Can it be said that trade was an important element in the economy of that area?

The reflections are mainly based on my own observations and my own, I hope, logical reasoning, the theoretical literature being left out of consideration. I had not been able to gain access to the papers of the seminar held in Santa Fé in 1973, published under the title Ancient Civilization and Trade in 1975, before the Rencontre. Having taken cognizance of this book, it can be stated that the approach to the problems is different from that in this paper; the studies, analysing the trade itself, mainly in prehistoric and protohistoric times, have a clear theoretical character, whereas this paper only regards the two above-mentioned aspects in historical times, starting from some conspicuous facts and questions arising from them.

In den uns bekannten Sprachen des Alten Orients findet sich kein Ausdruck, der etwa “Kaufmanns-” oder “Handelssprache” bedeutet. Zwar werden in der sumerisch-akkadischen Tradition Sondersprachen wie die “Sprache der nešakku-Priester”, die “Sprache der Reinigungspriester” oder die “Sprache der Salbpriester” erwähnt, auch Berufssprachen wie die “Sprache der Silberschmiede” oder die “Sprache der Steinschneider” oder die wohl als “Jargon” aufzufassenden “Sprachen” der “Rindertreiber”, der “Rinderhirten” und der “Schiffer”. Doch ist auch hier die Bezeichnung für eine besondere “Sprache der Kaufleute”, etwa eme dam + gàra(k) oder eme ga + raša(k) bzw. lišān tamkārī, nicht überliefert.

Dieser Befund ist indessen nicht als negatives Indiz gegen das Bewußtsein von einer besonderen “Sprache des Handels” im Alten Orient anzusehen, sondern wohl eher als ein zufälliges Ergebnis der Überlieferung. Denn gerade für den Handel und seine Organisation hatte sich seit der Frühdynastischen Zeit ein besonderer Berufsstand herausgebildet, der altsumerisch durch das Abstraktum nam.ga + raš “Kaufmannschaft” bezeichnet wird. Nicht so aussagekräftig ist das entsprechende akkadische Abstraktum tamkārūtum, da Abstrakta von Berufsbezeichnungen im Akkadischen sehr produktiv sind; doch ist churritisch damqarašši “Kaufmannschaft” wiederum ein deutliches Kriterium für eine Sonderstellung der Funktionäre des Handelswesens. Die hethitischen Gesetze berücksichtigen eigens den “Kaufmann” (unattallsš), wenn auch nicht in demselben Maße wie etwa der Codex Hammurabi. Und im Ugaritischen sind immerhin zwei verschiedene Bezeichnungen für “Kaufmann” (bidalu und *makkaru) bekannt.

The text which forms the subject of this article is housed in the Free Library of Philadelphia. I found it there last year as a boxful of fragments which had to be put laboriously together, and I groaned when I saw them, thinking “Oh, here's another Lagaš tablet”. Indeed, it is a Lagaš tablet, but it is certainly not of any ordinary kind. I have never seen anything like it. It will be immediately apparent that the text is a list of fish offerings which the wife of Urukagina brought in Nippur to a number of deities. These deities include Inanna, perhaps Ninlil, and Šara.

Šara, the city god of Umma, has for all I know nothing to do in Nippur. He had no sanctuary there. So, even though the offerings were brought in Nippur, at least those in Šara's name must have been meant for Umma.

This is so unusual in a Lagaš text that rather far-reaching explanations may be warranted. I would suggest the following synthesis of the facts:

In his third year in office, Urukagina had sensed the threatening danger, the thunderclouds that were gathering in Umma. He tried to stave off the impending catastrophe by diplomacy. He and his wife embarked on a goodwill mission by donating sacrifices to the principal gods of Umma and Nippur. The offerings were made in Nippur because Enlil, the chief god of that city, held the key to the kingship of all Sumer and had bestowed it on Lugalzagesi, the ambitious ensi of Umma. The offerings may even have been brought on the occasion of Lugalzagesi's coronation in Nippur.

The theory that the Sumerian economy was controlled by the state or temple has until recently been a premise generally accepted by those who have attempted to deal with economic activity in the third millennium B.C. This theory has necessarily had a profound effect upon the interpretation of the role of the merchant in this period of Mesopotamian history. Since our evidence is by no means sufficient to reconstruct merchant activity in detail, our view of this aspect of Mesopotamian economic life is decisively conditioned by our theory of the total economy. For this reason, I have sketched out in what follows the theoretical basis which underlies the position taken in the present paper, as well as my understanding of the theoretical position to which it stands opposed.

During the 1920's, Anton Deimel reconstructed, on the basis of surviving tablets available to him, the basic structure of the archive of Bau in Girsu during the administrations of Lugalanda and Uru'inimgina (UruKAgina). Operating with the evidence assembled by Deimel, and taking his rather tentative deductions to what seemed at the time to be the logical conclusion, Anna Schneider and others arrived at a view of Sumerian society in which the temple functioned as the heart and brain of the whole. In the context of such a view, which for many years has affected both Assyriological and popular literature on the subject, the merchant can hardly be interpreted otherwise than as an employee of that central controlling agency. Thus, the economy of the third millennium tended to be categorized under such rubrics as “theocracy” and “statism”. The economy of this era was contrasted with the “capitalism” of the Old Babylonian period, and the differences between the economy reflected in the documents of the two eras were often assigned to the influx of new Semitic peoples, a classic case of explaining unknowns by another unknown or, perhaps, of the uncritical generalization of some specific Semitic stereotype such as the Carthaginian in Plautus' Poenulus.

Records of commercial activity from Sargonic Mesopotamia offer a wealth of evidence to the student of ancient trade and business. In view of the richness of the documentation and the dearth of studies dealing with it, a broad survey of the problems and evidence seems called for in preference to a detailed study of a particular issue or group of texts. Questions that such a survey confronts are the nature and purpose of commerce in Sargonic Mesopotamia; who the people were who engaged in it and why; what the sources of their capital were; what commodities they dealt in, where and why; how their business was conducted, and what sort of records they kept. Documents and letters from various sites provide answers to some of these questions, even if they raise other problems of their own. This essay considers each of these questions in turn and the evidence the texts provide that helps to answer them.

Commerce in the Sargonic period is best defined by recourse to contemporaneous terminology: šám, that is, buying and selling of commodities. The purpose of this commerce was two-fold: to make a profit and to acquire goods not available locally in Mesopotamia. Most of the available documents are records of business transactions of a profitable sort. Of these two possible motives for commerce: personal or institutional profit and the necessity of importing foreign commodities, the profit motive was probably the more important in the Sargonic period. Evidence for this hypothesis will be offered below.

The attention of Assyriologists has long been focused on persons bearing the title of merchant in the various periods of Mesopotamian history. But it has been difficult to reconstruct the activities of merchants for any one period. Recent efforts to collect silver balanced accounts have made it possible to analyse in some detail the activities of a small group of merchants in the city of Umma during the Ur III period (2112–2004 B.C.).

There are many aspects of their activities that we do not yet understand, but in broad outlines the Umma silver balanced account system in which some merchants worked is clear to us, and its functions and purposes can be surveyed. Although in the course of investigation several texts came to light which were previously neglected or unpublished, these texts did not markedly alter the general view of the system.

La documentation qui nous a été laissée par l'administration sumérienne d'Ur III a mis à la disposition des chercheurs des monceaux de renseignements sur toute la vie économique du temps. On a déjà extrait de ces archives de nombreuses indications sur les prix des métaux, des parfums et d'autres marchandises, ou sur l'activité des dam.gàr. D'autre part, on connaît en gros les problèmes essentiels de l'économie sumérienne: manque de bois de construction, de pierres, de métaux et, en regard, abondance de céréales et prospérité de l'élevage.

Il est donc inutile de revenir sur ces questions.

Mon propos est de vérifier, pour une période déterminée, les généralités communément admises, de voir si elles reflètent la réalité et de rectifier peut-être certaines perspectives.

En particulier seront examinés deux aspects qui, nous le verrons, sont connexes: 1) la différenciation entre marchandises de première nécessité, marchandises utiles et marchandises de luxe, d'une part, et 2) le volume du commerce et son éthique, d'autre part.

That Sumerian literary compositions, despite the rarefied, etherial, unworldly nature of much of their content, could prove to be significant source material for such practical, mundane, workaday matters as trade and commerce, has been known a long time, ever since the text of the hymns inscribed on the Gudea Cylinders was edited and published some seventy years ago. When therefore the theme of this Rencontre was announced, it occurred to me that it might be useful to search through all, or at least most, of the available Sumerian literary documents with an eye for those passages that have some relevance for trade and commerce, for barter and exchange. This paper will present the rather meagre results of this search.

Beginning with the myths, I found that there were four which contained passages relating to commerce and trade: (1) the Ur version of the Dilmun myth “Enki and Ninhursag”; (2) the myth commonly known as “Enki and the World Order”; (3) the poem celebrating the journey of Nanna-Suen to Nippur; (4) the myth revolving about the transfer of the me from Eridu to Erech, in which the deities Inanna and Enki are the main protagonists.

In diesem Vortrag möchte ich einige Gedanken zur wirtschaftsgeschichtlichen Deutung eines Abschnitts im sumerischen Epos “Enki und Ninhursag” kurz andeuten. Wie bekannt, ist diese Dichtung in drei, mehr oder weniger voneinander abweichenden Fassungen überliefert. Die Passage über den Tilmunhandel kommt aber nur in einer der beiden am Textanfang nahezu vollständigen Varianten vor, nämlich in der Rezension von Ur. Seitdem C. J. Gadd und S. N. Kramer den Text der einst von L. Woolley ausgegrabenen Tafel 1963 veröffentlicht hatten, haben Viele zumindest kurze Bemerkungen zur Interpretation des Textes beigesteuert, darunter sind in erster Linie S. N. Kramer selbst, und dann A. Falkenstein, D. O. Edzard, J. Krecher, ferner W. F. Leemans, G. Bibby, C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, G. Pettinato u.a. zu nennen. Der Text ist durch die erneuten Diskussionen um Tilmun gewissermassen populär geworden. Die Passage wird allgemein für eine Beschreibung der weitreichenden Handelsbeziehungen Tilmuns, d.h. der Insel Bahrein im Persischen Golf, gehalten. Diese Auffassung trifft in grossen Zügen zu. Es bleibt übrig, sie zu präzisieren, und dadurch zwei Fragen zu beantworten: Auf welche Zeit bezieht sich die im Text gegebene Beschreibung?, und: Warum ist der Tilmunhandel für den mesopotamischen Dichter so wichtig?

Stat. B 5, 21–27, 20 und Zyl. A 15, 6–16, 29 wurden untersucht und festgestellt, daß ein kultisch bedingter, literarischer Topos vorliegt, der in den Riten zur Königskrönung seinen Ursprung hat, aber der nur begrenzten Wert als historische Primärquelle besitzt. Die wichtigsten Beweispunkte und Ergebnisse seien hier zusammengefaßt.

1. Vergleicht man die Liste der Herkunftsländer der Materialien, so ergibt sich eine genaue Übereinstimmung in den beiden Inschriften: 5, 21–6, 20/15, 19–34, 6, 21–44/16, 15–29, 6, 45–50/15, 6–18, 6, 51–7, 20/16, 7–10; 15, 25–16, 6; 16, 11–14. Dies läßt auf eine gemeinsame Quelle oder auf eine gemeinsame Tradition schließen.

2. Die Anzahl der Länder ist 16 bzw. 12, die Anzahl der Materialien 20 bzw. 21 in Stat. B und Zyl. A. Daraus folgt: nicht die Vollständigkeit der Beziehungen mit anderen Ländern, sondern deren Anzahl im jeweiligen Textzusammenhang ist wichtig.

3. Die Richtung Süd wird nicht genannt, vgl. Stat. D 4, 2–14. Die Richtungen der übrigen Länder bilden eine fallende Reihe von Ost über West nach Nord. Dazu ist Zyl. A 14, 7–15, 5, die Aushebung in den Gemarkungen des Ningirsu, der Nansche und der Inanna, zu vergleichen.

Trade in metals, notably the precious metals gold and silver, and the base metals copper and tin, represents one of the major aspects of Bronze Age commerce. It has been argued that the first large-scale growth of a metals trade, during the mid-third millennium B.C., stimulated the development of international commerce and made possible the wealth of the EB II period in the Aegean, Anatolia and the Near East. Trade in metals continued to be one of the most important elements of commerce down to the end of the Bronze Age. Thus a proper understanding of the nature and the scope of this trade is essential to the study of Bronze Age civilization and the nature of foreign relations in the third and second millennia B.C.

Since these metals were available only in certain areas, trade was essential for the development of metallurgy in those parts of the ancient world without native mineral resources, especially the Aegean and Mesopotamia. As virtually no work has been done on sources or uses of silver in the Bronze Age this paper will concentrate upon trade in gold, copper and tin. Technological developments will be discussed only in so far as they made possible the utilization of certain types of ores and hence influenced the growth of trade.

In Sir Leonard Woolley's account of the Royal Cemetery at Ur, Dr. Plenderleith mentions in his section on metal techniques a minute ring (diameter 2 mm) composed of six gold granules, which was found in the tomb of Queen Pu-Abi, and states, “The Sumerians were the first people we know to have shown skill in filigree and granulated work”. While there is no difficulty in finding examples of filigree or crude attempts at granulation in the Royal Cemetery, the six-granule ring is (with the strip discussed below) the only evidence that, in the Early Dynastic period, goldsmiths were able to produce the fine granulated work comparable to that known in the 3rd Dynasty of Ur and Early Babylonian periods. But until recently it was impossible to examine this celebrated piece because it could not be found among the collections of Ur jewellery in London, Baghdad or Philadelphia. To-day, however, it is on loan to the Institute of Archaeology in London from the Brotherton Library of the University of Leeds, (the gift of J. R. Ogden), where a search, lasting over ten years, for what must be the smallest piece of archaeological evidence for the earliest use of this intricate and highly skilled technique, unexpectedly ended. (Plate Ia).

A detailed scientific report by Dr. Seeley will be published when work on the entire Leeds collection is completed but to date we can say that while there is a variation of copper and silver in the granules of the six-granule ring one of the granules and a joint between two of the granules are virtually 100% gold (Appendix I). We may therefore conclude that the goldsmith was using extremely small quantities of native gold obtained either from different alluvial sources or from the same river source but varying in composition.

R. Maxwell-Hyslop hat die grosse Bedeutung hervorgehoben, die das Erdgrab 20 in Assur hat, und zwar sowohl für die Geschichte des Schmucks als auch zur Datierung der berühmten Schätze aus Troia. Sie hat auch bedenkenswerte chronologische Folgerungen daraus gezogen; da dies an etwas versteckter Stelle geschah und deshalb bisher nicht beachtet wurde, und da ich glaube, ihre Beobachtungen noch stützen zu können, sei dieser für den altassyrischen Metallhandel so wichtige Komplex hier noch einmal vorgeführt.

Unter den Schmucksachen sind es zwei Formen, die das Erdgrab 20 mit dem ‘Schatz A’ in Troia verbinden: röhrenförmige Perlen mit vierfach spiralig aufgerollten Enden und halbmondförmige Ohrringe, deren Körper dergestalt getrieben ist, dass er von aussen aus drei senkrecht nebeneinander hängenden Halbmondscheiben zu bestehen scheint (Fig. 1). Man kann gegen diese Vergleiche einwenden, dass die Geschichte der Schmuckformen weder in Westkleinasien noch in Mesopotamien hinreichend bekannt sei, um danach genau datieren zu können; und in der Tat sind Doppelspiralen ein nahezu weltweites Motiv. Jedoch ist zum Mindesten der zweite Vergleich besonders schlagend deshalb, weil es sich um eine sehr spezielle, technisch nicht ganz einfache Sonderform innerhalb eines allgemeinen Typs handelt: den der senkrecht gegliederten Halbmond-Ohrringe.

Les tablettes “cappadociennes” constituent la documentation la plus riche permettant de connaître l'activité commerciale de l'antiquité assyro-babylonienne et notamment les échanges internationaux. Sans doute, leurs allusions sont-elles souvent concises; nul texte ne précise la portée des mots techniques désignant les institutions. C'est par recoupements et comparaisons que nous parvenons à lever un coin du voile. Néanmoins, un certain nombre de traits généraux ressortent aujourd'hui avec une clarté suffisante pour permettre une vision d'ensemble. A la demande des organisateurs de ces “Rencontres”, je voudrais tout d'abord rappeler brièvement quelques traits fondamentaux du mouvement d'échanges commerciaux, qui s'est développé entre l'Assyrie et l'Asie mineure au XIXe siècle av. J. C. Puis, j'essaierai de préciser le rôle des marchands, en examinant tour à tour ce que l'on sait du tamkārum paléoassyrien et les activités de quelques personnalités marquantes.

Around the middle of the nineteenth century B.C., according to a calculated guess, as much as 2,000 inhabitants of the City of Assur were in some way involved in OA Trade. Roughly one-third of this number lived in or regularly travelled to and in Anatolia. This involvement of so many people must have had a serious impact on Assyrian society. In this paper an attempt is made to point out some of its social effects. “Social” is taken in a broad sense, including some more economic aspects; social and economic facts of ancient Assyria cannot and should not be treated separately.

The treatment of this subject is hampered by some serious limitations. Diachronic comparisons, correlating social changes with the development of the trade, are almost impossible, because we know hardly anything about OA society before the period under review. We are also largely ignorant about the effects of the disruption of the trade at the end of Kültepe II. Changes and differences revealing themselves in the period Kültepe Ib are not necessarily “natural” developments, but may be due to the influence of the new king Šamši-Adad I, and to inner Anatolian developments.

Beginning with the publication of Garelli's book “Les assyriens en Cappadoce” in 1963, a new wave of research into the Old Assyrian political, economic, and social structures has brought about a quite detailed understanding of many central aspects of the Old Assyrian society. It is my impression that something approaching a consensus has been reached in a number of important fields, and it is readily obvious where most of the pressing new problems are to be found. Many basic commercial procedures have been adequately analysed, the technical vocabulary of the merchants is beginning to be understood, the political system of the Assyrian state and the basis for the existence of the colonies on foreign soil has been described. However, all these studies have also made it very clear that the Old Assyrian colonial system constituted a highly sophisticated commercial milieu, and many features in the socio-economic structures bear witness to the complexity with which we have to deal in our work on the texts. Obviously, there cannot be a general agreement in all areas, and such differences of opinion must be reflected in our translations and interpretations of technical terms which can be seen to refer to central concepts. A case in point is the word tamkārum, “merchant”, which is dealt with in Garelli's contribution in this volume. Garelli tends to see this term as a title which refers to an official, and my own view is that it denotes a contractually regulated capacity and thus that it is not a title. One interpretation leads to the concept of a centralized bureaucracy in Assur, the other does not necessitate such a reconstruction. At the moment we can do little more than note the difference of opinion and attempt to present a coherent theory, but I believe that it is important at the same time to realize that these different views reflect two more or less clearly defined models of the Old Assyrian society. I have the feeling that some scholars think that such conceptual models should somehow be avoided, and that they constitute a danger to a real understanding of the ancients and their world, but such a view rests on a misunderstanding; it is not true that the “real” scholar is only interested in the texts and builds his theories exclusively on them, for any analysis entails some conceptual model. In fact, the success of our efforts often depends on how well we understand the models which we are using.