How to Find Ancient Assyrian Cities Using Economics

By Maxwell Tabarrok. Excerpts:

"Trade, Merchants, and the Lost Cities of the Bronze Age is an economics paper published in the QJE in 2019 and written as a collaboration between three economists (Thomas Chaney, Kerem Coşar, Ali Hortaçsu) and a historian of ancient Assyria, Gojko Barjamovic.

The idea of this paper is to use mentions of trade on Assyrian clay tablets from nearly four thousand years ago to estimate the size and location of ancient Assyrian cities, even those whose true location is unknown. They build a model that accurately recreates the location of known cities and makes predictions for the locations of lost cities that often line up with active archaeological sites, the best-guesses of historians, and sometimes favor the guesses of some historians over others.

The authors also find evidence for extremely long-term persistence of the distance elasticity of trade as well as city size and location. The predicted size of ancient Assyrian cities in their model correlates strongly with the size of their closest modern counterparts and the costs of distance to trade seem to be the same on bronze age wagon-roads as they are on modern Turkish highways."

"Around 1900 BCE, this city [Kaneš] was a flourishing entrepot. Despite being deep within Hittite territory, the economic activity of the city was dominated by a community of Assyrian expatriate traders with connections to the powerful city state of Assur, near modern day Mosul in Iraq. So important was this city to Assyrian trade that it hosted an Assyrian court that adjudicated disputes between merchants.

In ancient Kaneš, court transcripts, trading contracts, and merchant accounting were all recorded on clay tablets. Clay tablets preserve well, so this period is in some ways better known then the next several thousand years of history. The authors claim that “the closest comparable corpora of ancient trade data are almost 3,000 years later, coming, for example, from the medieval Italian merchant archives and the Cairo Genizah”

This confluence of durable medium and economic material makes Kaneš the perfect archaeological site for this project. Tens of thousands of clay tablet records were produced or stored here, all concentrated to within a few decades. The economic and political pull of Kaneš’ trading hub and outpost of the Assyrian court pulled all the major traders in the area to establish a presence here. This means there are lots of records of trade between cities that don’t even include Kaneš as archival records for agents of larger companies based in Assur or as evidence in trials. The cherry on top: the entire city burned in a fire, preserving the clay records to be recovered forty centuries later.

The authors use some natural language processing and manual inspection to narrow down from tens of thousands of tablets to several hundred unambiguous mentions of trade between two of 25 Anatolian cities that have enough trade connections with each other to be identified in a gravity model. They are using the number of mentions of trade, rather than a more continuous measure of the value or volume of trade goods flow due to data constraints. 15 of the cities in their sample have known locations, but 10 are lost and have disputed locations among historians."

"The central model here is the gravity model of trade which in simplest terms predicts the amount of trade between two places as proportional to the economic “mass” of the two places (e.g their population or GDP) and inversely proportional to the distance between them, echoing Newtonian gravity."

Related posts:

New PBS Series "First Civilizations" Has Interesting Episode On Trade (2018) 

Some History of Insurance (Insuring Against Disaster: Insurance policies go back to the ancient Babylonians and were crucial in the early development of capitalism) (2019) 

World's oldest writing not poetry but a shopping receipt (2020)

'World's oldest' coin factory discovered in China (2021) 

Both numeracy and literacy were invented in the service of finance and commerce (2024) 

Price controls in ancient Rome (2024)

Related article:

The V.C.s of B.C. by Adam Davidson in The NY Times (2015) Excerpt: 

"during one 30-year period — between 1890 and 1860 B.C. — for one community in the town of Kanesh, we know a great deal. Through a series of incredibly unlikely events, archaeologists have uncovered the comprehensive written archive of a few hundred traders who left their hometown Assur, in what is now Iraq, to set up importing businesses in Kanesh, which sat roughly at the center of present-day Turkey"