Lamassi's Letters: A Weaver of Ancient Assur

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Today, a woman in the city of Assur, nearly four thousand years ago, who wove cloth for a long-distance trade and answered her husband's complaints in letters that still survive. Welcome to Hidden History. Take a break from the modern world and journey into a merchant's house on the Tigris River, where the looms rarely stopped.

The letter is about the size of the palm of your hand. It's a slab of clay, covered edge to edge in tiny wedge-shaped marks, and it opens the way these letters always did. "Say to Pushu-ken: thus says Lamassi."

Then she gets to the point. "Why do you write to me every time, saying, 'The textiles that you keep sending me are not good'? Who is this man who lives in your house and criticizes the textiles when they get to him?"

That was written around 1880 BC, in Assur, a city on a rocky bluff above the Tigris in what is now northern Iraq. The word Assyria tends to call up the later empire of war chariots and carved lion hunts. That was still a thousand years off. Lamassi's Assur was a modest city-state of perhaps seven to ten thousand people, dominated by merchant families, and its business was trade.

Merchants there bought tin, which came from the east by way of Elam, in what is now Iran. Mixed with copper, tin made bronze, and the kingdoms of Anatolia, the high plateau of modern Turkey, wanted it. The merchants also bought fine woolen cloth. They loaded it all onto black donkeys, roughly a hundred and forty pounds of tin to an animal, or around twenty-five pieces of cloth. The caravans walked for about six weeks, across the Euphrates and through the mountains, some seven hundred miles, to a city called Kanesh, near modern Kayseri. There the Assyrians kept their own merchant quarter, sold the goods for silver and gold, and sent the metal home.

Lamassi's husband, Pushu-ken, was one of the leading merchants of that first generation in Kanesh, and he stayed there for years at a stretch. Lamassi ran the house in Assur. And a good share of the cloth in those caravans came out of houses like hers.

The women of the merchant families wove for export, along with their daughters and the enslaved women of the household. Researchers working with experimental weavers in Copenhagen have estimated what one standard export piece demanded. It measured about thirteen feet by fifteen, woven in strips and sewn together. The spinning alone took one woman about three months, since a single piece used more than twenty miles of thread. All told, one woman might finish two and a half pieces a year.

A standard piece sold in Kanesh for about fifteen shekels of silver. After duties, the weaver could hope for ten or twelve. A third of that, spent on raw wool back home, bought enough for six or seven new pieces. The women were paid in silver or gold, and the money was theirs. They lent it at interest, bought houses, and invested in caravans, as the men did.

So the argument was about real money. Pushu-ken had complained the pieces were too small. "Was it not at your own request that I reduced the size?" she writes. Now he wanted half a pound more wool in each one. "Well, I have done so." She lists who is carrying what: nine pieces with one man, three with another. Some carriers refused to take any more.

The rest of the household comes through in the same letters. Wool is expensive in Assur, she tells him, so when you send the purse of silver, pack some wool inside it. One time no cloth is coming, because she has had to make clothing for the servants and the children. A neighbor built his wall right against theirs, then left town without settling it. A tax official came to her for about a pound of silver her husband owed in export duty, and she refused to hand it over, telling him the city's chief official could come and seize the house first. And then a line of plain envy: since you left, a man named Shalim-ahum has built two houses. When will we be able to do the same?

Several letters close the same way. Their daughter has grown up. Come home and dedicate her to the god Assur. "Be an honorable man," she writes, "break your obligations, and come here." She had to write it more than once.

Some of Pushu-ken's replies survive too. In one, he settles accounts with her like a business partner: the full price of her earlier cloth has been paid, eleven more pieces are on his books, and a mina of silver is on its way to her under his seal.

The daughter, Ahaha, was dedicated to the god and stayed unmarried. Lamassi had gold beads made for her. Lamassi herself never made the journey to Anatolia. She died in Assur, and a copy of a letter Pushu-ken sent to his agents there preserves the line, "Alas! My wife is dead!" He died around 1870 BC. Ahaha spent years untangling his estate, holding off creditors, and writing sharp letters to her brothers, one of whom had been dipping into her investments. "Note well," she wrote, "three and a half minas of gold belong to me!"

All of this survives because the letters traveled one way and stayed put. The merchants in Kanesh kept what they received, in jars and sacks and baskets on wooden shelves. Around 1835 BC, fire swept through part of the merchant quarter and baked the clay hard. The people got out. Their papers did not.

By the late nineteenth century, local diggers were pulling tablets from the mound and selling them, which is how the family's letters ended up in museums from New Haven to London, Paris, Berlin and Geneva. Systematic excavation began in 1948, and the count now stands at about twenty-three thousand tablets, among the oldest family archives ever found. Assur itself has never yielded the houses of Lamassi's time. They lie under the ruins of the later imperial city.

So a palm-sized piece of clay keeps the voice of a woman at her loom on the Tigris, counting out wool, standing off the tax collector, wanting a bigger house, and asking a husband seven hundred miles away who exactly had been criticizing her work.

Thanks for listening to Hidden History.