A Year of Vengeance by Edward Stratford

Author:Edward Stratford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Published: 2017-05-25T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

The Volume of Trade

The reconstruction of the year of vengeance began with Ilabrat-bāni misappropriating 6⅓ minas of Šalim-aḫum’s tin. This was not a significant amount in relation to the total amount of tin that Šalim-aḫum was shipping to Anatolia at the time. Ilabrat-bāni likely sensed this, thinking the 6⅓ minas compared favorably with other typical costs on the road. His gross violation of shipping protocols aside, Ilabrat-bāni’s reasoning was not too far off-base. But the tin Ilabrat-bāni took, and the greater amount that Šalim-aḫum took back, existed in the context of an Assyrian volume of trade. If a close analysis of Šalim-aḫum’s activities provide a meaningful shift in consideration of the tempos of trade in the Assyrian trans-Taurus trade, then by the same token, a tally of his commercial activities has implications for a closely-related phenomena: the volume of goods that passed through the Assyrian trade each year. Earlier estimates are grossly outdated, and, however judicious they may have been regarding the basic numbers found in the documents, they are blunted by their lack of any real temporal dimension.

Analyzing Šalim-aḫum’s trade volume during the year of vengeance, along with evidence of other merchants’ volumes, provides a new framework on which to extrapolate the scale of the Old Assyrian trade. But it must be kept in mind that the year of vengeance was certainly not a year where the merchants (who lived through it) felt like they were doing the kind of volume to which they were accustomed. Šalim-aḫum’s letters reveal he was certainly afraid of low revenues. Nor is the present review able to produce a comprehensive characterization of Old Assyrian trade volume. Here, only one metric will be attempted. Some Assyrians generated profit within Anatolia, but most of their capital (as best we can tell) arose from the chief ‘exports’ of Assur: tin and textiles.825 Šalim-aḫum specialized in exporting tin and textiles, making a survey of his commercial volume in the year of vengeance directly applicable.

Rather than proposing independent volumes of tin and textiles, I will instead focus on the donkey-load. There were periods when the colony demanded an equal number of donkeys in a caravan carrying tin and textiles from the home city. For the Assyrian treaties with cities on the route, the focus was often on the donkey-load.826 And because the present analysis will primarily yield a sense of scale as opposed to a real estimate, donkey-loads will be a useful metric. Donkeys bore not only individual loads of tin or textiles on their journeys, but in some sense the weight of the entire trade. So in honor of all the donkeys fallen in the pursuit of Assyrian profit, Old Assyrian exports will be expressed in terms of donkey-loads, split evenly, albeit over-simply, between tin and textiles. A conservative estimate of 5000 donkey-loads exported annually better signals the scale of trade than previous, much smaller, estimates. If this were equally divided, it would yield 62,500 textiles and 200 tons of tin. While this tin figure seems

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