The First Multinationals: Assyria circa 2000 B.C
Management International Review, April, 1998
Karl Moore, David Lewis
* Assyrian International Trad:
The ancient city of Ashur, around 100 km south of the modern Iraqi city of Mosul, was situated on the banks of the river Tigris at the intersection of a number of important long-distance trade routes. At the beginning of the second millennium B.C. it became self governing, following the collapse of the so-called Third Dynasty of Ur, to which it had belonged. Early rulers, such as Ilu-shuma and his son Erishum I (c. 1939-1900 B.C.), did much to exploit the commercial potential offered by the geographic location of Ashur. Inscriptions have been recovered which record the granting of tax and other concessions to traders from the more southerly cities of Mesopotamia.
However, the richest source of documentation comes not for Ashur itself but from a city 1200 km. away: the ancient site of Kanesh, chief city of what was later known as the kingdom of Cappadocia, near the modern Turkish city of Kayseri. Nearly 20,000 clay tablets with texts in Assyrian cuneiform have been unearthed at the site. Of the documents which have been published from Kanesh, over 85% are of an economic nature, attesting to the existence of a thriving trade center, active between around 1910 and 1830 B.C. (Veenhof 1995).
Not merely a way station for traders, the lower city of Kanesh was largely given over to a permanent settlement of international businesspeople, especially Assyrian businesspeople from Ashur (Veenhof 1995). Archaeological evidence elsewhere from this period, states Veenhof, "at Acemhuyuk; ancient Puruskhanda, south of the Salt Lake - reveal business connections with Mari and Karkamish on the Euphrates as well ... [it was] a great trading city with a network of international relations" (1995, p. 862). It is this network of international activity to which we will return presently.
A key economic element of the region was tin, which had probably been imported to Ashur from Afghanistan. It was wrapped in saleable textiles and transported by donkey caravan for the five- or six-week journey to Kanesh, where it, the textiles and the donkeys were sold for silver, copper and finished bronze goods. The tablets record the day-to-day business transactions of the Ashur merchants and others involved in this trade.
Assyria was chosen as the subject for this article because there is more evidence that MNEs existed in this region than for other nations of antiquity. The first known human system of writing was invented in Southern Mesopotamia around 3100 B.C. (Hawkins 1979) in order to record economic and accounting transactions. Several even more ancient sites than Kanesh have produced an abundance of tablets (Adams/Nissen 1972). However, the site of Kanesh provides the first detailed evidence of large-scale multinational private enterprise, albeit with some "state assistance". (3)
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