Human and Divine at Bronze Age Assur and Kaneš: The Religious World of an Assyrian Merchant Community In Central Anatolia, ca. 1895-1865

Abstract

This dissertation provides a synthetic overview of religion during the Old Assyrian period, with a particular focus on the thirty-year window from 1895-1865 BCE during which the bulk of the ca. 23,000 preserved cuneiform texts were written. The extensive corpus of letters and documents of practice, along with published archaeological reports, combined with the narrow chronological window means that the work is an intimate study of the religious world of the best-attested generation of Assyrian merchant and their families, as well as their immediate ancestors and descendants. The dissertation examines the scholarly discourse around the concept of “religion,” and especially ancient “religion,” and then analyzes the textual, visual, archaeological, and onomastic evidence from the Assyrian community in Anatolia in order to describe the religious world of the merchant community. The work focuses on the agency of non-human social actors typically coded as “religious”: gods, demons, and the dead. It argues that the functioning of human society at Assur and Kaneš was predicated upon the agency of these non-human social actors, and analyzes the formative role played by these “religious” beings in spheres such as human identity formation, family dynamics, and the daily, prosaic operation of governance and long-distance trade. The Old Assyrian texts describing these human-divine interactions are frequently written by women, cultural outsiders, or other individuals whose voices are seldom accessible to scholarship.