The Early Geography of South-Eastern Asia Minor

Abstract

Thanks to the cuneiform tablets discovered at Boghaz-Keui, the capital of the Hittite empire, the thick darkness which hung over the geography of eastern Asia Minor in the pre-classical age is at last being dispelled. And therewith several questions relating to the culture and history of prehistoric Greece are likely to be cleared up.At Kara Eyuk, also called Kul Tepè, ‘the Burnt Mound,’ eighteen kilometres N.E. of Kaisariyeh and near the village of Manjé-su, many hundreds of tablets have been found written in a West-Semitic dialect, differing but little from the vernacular of Assyria as distinct from Babylonia, and belonging to the age of the Babylonian Third Dynasty of Ur (2400–2200 B.C.). The name of the city was Kanis or Ganis, and it was a Babylonian colony, defended by the Assyrian soldiers of the Babylonian empire, but chiefly occupied by Babylonian and more especially Assyrian merchants, who worked the mines of silver, copper and lead in the Taurus and exported the metal to the civilised world. The great Babylonian firms had their ‘agents’ there; good roads had been made throughout the whole region, in connexion with the trade-route from Babylonia past Nineveh to Cappadocia, and traversed by postmen whose letters were in the form of clay tablets. I may remark incidentally that one of the places from which the copper came was Khalki, perhaps meaning ‘Wheat’-city (Contenau: Trente Tablettes cappadociennes, xvi. 12, 131), which probably gives us the origin of the Greek Χαλκός.