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https://www.archaeology.org/issues/530-2311/features/11800-kanesh-assyrian-letters>
"The parents of an Assyrian woman named Zizizi were furious. Like many of their
neighbors’ children, their daughter had dutifully wed an Assyrian merchant.
Sometime around the year 1860 B.C., she had traveled with him to the faraway
Anatolian city of Kanesh in modern-day Turkey, where he traded textiles. But
her husband passed away and, instead of returning to her family, Zizizi chose
to marry a local. “Before god, you do not treat me, your father, like a
gentleman! You have left the family!” wrote her father, Imdi-ilum, using a reed
stylus to press neat wedge-shaped, or cuneiform, characters into a small clay
tablet. Zizizi’s mother, Ishtar-bashti, also signed the missive. Her parents
did not explicitly state disapproval over Zizizi’s choice of husband—in fact,
as they reminded her, they had financially supported her second marriage. But
they resented the fact that after her marriage, she hadn’t done more to help
their family business of exporting textiles to Anatolia. “We are not important
in your eyes,” they seethed.
The tablet would have dried in the sun near the parents’ home in the Assyrian
city of Assur, on the banks of the Tigris River in modern Iraq, before being
wrapped in a thin cloth and placed in a clay envelope. As was done with much
Assyrian correspondence, one or both of Zizizi’s parents would have taken a
stone cylinder that hung from a cord around their neck and rolled it across the
envelope’s surface, creating a ribbonlike impression or seal. Her mother’s seal
depicts tall deerlike figures with long horns standing upright, each one
leaning on a staff. This seal was unique to Ishtar-bashti and functioned like
an ID, signaling to Zizizi that the letter was indeed from her mother. Next,
the tablet was packed on a donkey caravan and transported for six weeks across
750 miles of Syrian steppe, southeastern Turkey’s Taurus Mountains, and,
finally, the Anatolian plains to Kanesh, where Zizizi had launched a career as
a successful moneylender. There, Zizizi, who had settled into her new life but
perhaps still missed her parents, filed away the tablet in a private archive in
her home.
Nearly 4,000 years later, archaeologists discovered the angry missive during
excavations at the site of the ancient city in central Turkey, now known as
Kültepe, a low, grassy plain crowned by a tall mound. More than 23,000
cuneiform tablets have been uncovered at the site. Of these, epigrapher and
Assyriologist Cécile Michel of the French National Center for Scientific
Research has curated and interpreted more than 300 that bear letters written by
or to women who belonged to a highly literate Assyrian merchant class. “With
private correspondence, we go deeper and get closer to the people,” says
Michel. “It’s a contrast to official language, where there’s a big distance
between what people write and what people think.”"
Via Esther Schindler.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
