The bulk of the letters, contracts and court rulings found in Kanesh date from around 1900-1850 BC, a period when the Assyrians’ trading network was flourishing, bringing prosperity to the region and giving rise to many innovations. They became the first-known businesswomen, female bankers and female investors in the history of humanity. A new book gives unprecedented insight into a remarkable group within this community: women who seized new opportunities offered by social and economic change, and took on roles more typically filled by men at the time.
They belonged to Assyrian expats who had settled in Kanesh and kept up a lively correspondence with their families back in Assur, which lay six weeks away by donkey caravan. “Now is the time to do me a favour and to save me from financial stress!”Īhaha’s letters are among 23,000 clay tablets excavated over the past decades from the ruins of merchants’ homes in Kanesh. “Let a detailed letter from you come to me by the very next caravan, saying if they do pay the silver,” she wrote in another tablet.
EXAMPLE JOINT STOCK COMPANY IN HISTORY UPDATE
“Take care to act so that I will not be ruined!” She instructed Assur-mutappil to recover her silver and update her quickly. “I have nothing else apart from these funds,” she wrote in cuneiform script. So, she grabbed a reed stylus and clay tablet and scribbled a letter to another brother, Assur-mutappil, pleading for help: But Ahaha’s share of the profits seemed to have gone missing – possibly embezzled by one of her own brothers, Buzazu.
She and other investors had pooled silver to finance a donkey caravan delivering tin and textiles to Kanesh, where the goods would be exchanged for more silver, generating a tidy profit. Around 1870BC, in the city of Assur in northern Iraq, a woman called Ahaha uncovered a case of financial fraud.Īhaha had invested in long-distance trade between Assur and the city of Kanesh in Turkey.
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