Page 111 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

broken, though it may have been politic for a while to have non-
Amorite strawmen officially in charge of the southern end of the
business. And Abram probably learned to know the northern

trade routes, as he grew from youth to middle age, as well as he
had learnt the southern.
In Harran he would meet many traders, and among them not
a few from the Semitic, though not Amorite, kingdom of Assyria

to the east. Assyria lay in northern Mesopotamia, on both
banks of the upper Tigris. It was a small kingdom, at this time of

no great importance, and the language it spoke was akin to the
Semitic tongue of southern Mesopotamia and, like it, written in
cuneiform on clay tablets. Like all civilized countries at this time,
Assyria had extensive trade connections—along the Tigris to the

cities of the south, and westward along the foothills of Turkey
and over the Anti-Taurus range into central Asia Minor. This

latter route went by way of Harran and on, a farther two hun­
dred miles or so, to Kanesh.
Kanesh lay in central Asia Minor, on the fringes of the

Taurus mountains. Its inhabitants we know little about, and
when the archaeologist calls them Cappadocians he is merely
giving them a geographical label for convenience of reference.

But Abram probably knew the inhabitants well, and very likely
visited the city. When he did so, however, he would not stay
in the city proper. For outside the city lay a karum, established

by Assyrian merchants perhaps a hundred years ago, a concession
area run by the Assyrian merchant guilds, with a large degree of
extraterritorial privileges.

We have met the karum already in Ur. And it was probably
a feature of most of the cities of the world at this time. But at Ur
the karum seems merely to have been an area set aside, for ad­

ministrative convenience, as the office and warehouse area for
merchants who were largely citizens of Ur, subject to the laws

and the taxation of Ur, with no more special privileges than has,
for example, the City in London today. In more backward
regions, on the other hand, such as Kanesh, the karum corre­

sponded more closely to the “factories” of the early European
trade with the east, or the “foreign concession” in Chinese towns
until recently. They were self-governing colonies of foreign