Nearly 20,000 clay tablets have been excavated from Kultepe in central Turkey, site of the ancient trade city of Kanish. Of these, about 3,000 have appeared in line drawing and only 800 or so of those have been published in translation, a mere 4% of the total cache. Modern philological studies of these cuneiform texts are outstanding, but translations are critical if these Old Assyrian business documents are to be available to scholars outside of Assyriology.
W. C. Gwaltney, Jr. helps to rectify this situation by providing transliterations and translations of the 82 tablets and fragments that constitute the collection of unpublished Old Assyrian texts in the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, together with notes and indices, giving scholars from a wide variety of disciplines interested in ancient economies access to these valuable primary texts.
