Trade

From roughly the seventeenth to the early twelfth centuries BCE, the Hittite kingdom and empire was based in central Anatolia and, at its height, extended into northern Syria. Trade connected farming communities, administrative centres and ports. Metal supplies, cloth, grain and transport animals supported households and armies, while merchants working across political boundaries relied on rulers to protect their business and settle disputes.

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Exchange in an agricultural kingdom

Hittite economic life rested largely on farming and animal husbandry. Barley and wheat were important crops, while herds included cattle, sheep, goats, horses, mules, and donkeys. Grain stores at administrative centers helped collect and hold agricultural produce. The kingdom therefore depended on the work of cultivators and herders as well as on the movement of goods between places.

Land and labour were tied to political authority. Royal grants, temple estates and household holdings supplied produce under different arrangements. Some holdings carried service obligations, including military duties. Institutions could collect agricultural goods and direct labour, while households and merchants also exchanged products and services.

Military demands could affect production. Campaigns took people away from farming and other work, and losses of labor could make food supplies harder to maintain. Trade and access to resources were therefore connected to the kingdom’s wider capacity to support households, officials, and armies.

Routes, territory, and access to supplies

Geography shaped the kingdom’s commercial interests. Northern Syria lay on routes linking the Cilician Gates, the passes between Anatolia and the Mediterranean region, with Mesopotamia. Control and defense of this corridor mattered because it connected the Hittite realm to neighboring territories and wider networks of exchange. As Hittite rulers expanded their authority into northern Syria, they also brought important regional centers and routes within reach of the kingdom.

Bronze production required copper and tin to be brought together before metalworkers could cast or hammer tools, weapons and vessels. Routes through Anatolia and Syria connected workshops with raw materials and customers. Political control of a pass or a port could therefore affect access to supplies as well as the movement of armies.

Merchants at Ugarit

Thirteenth-century documents from Ugarit, a Syrian coastal kingdom under Hittite authority, describe merchants from Ura, a port in southern Anatolia. Some are called merchants of the Hittite king. They conducted business abroad with royal backing, but their dealings also created disputes with the local ruler.

After the king of Ugarit complained about their activities, Hattusili III regulated their residence. The merchants could trade there in summer but had to leave in winter. They were also forbidden to seize houses and fields for silver debts. The decree placed limits on foreign merchants’ acquisition of local property while allowing their trade to continue. It shows a Great King intervening between an allied ruler and commercially powerful subjects.

Goods, skilled work, and measures of value

Metals had practical as well as commercial value. Hittite legal texts refer to copper and bronze objects, and metalworking was among the skilled activities recognized in the laws. Textiles also appear in their provisions: weaving was a skilled occupation, and the laws list values for different kinds of cloth. Sheep supplied wool, linking pastoral production to textile manufacture.

Prices and compensation could be expressed in silver. The shekel, mina, and talent were units of weight used to measure valuable materials, not coin denominations. A Hittite measure reported in the economic evidence equated forty shekels with one mina. Barley and other goods could also serve in exchange or payment. Hittite legal provisions, for example, set rates for some hired labor in grain and record values for animals, agricultural produce, textiles, and metal objects. Together, these measures allowed people to compare different goods and obligations without requiring every transaction to involve the same material.

The laws also valued hired work and damaged property. A payment stated in grain transferred part of a harvest to a worker; a penalty stated in silver made unlike losses comparable by weight. The copied and revised schedules preserve official valuations, while merchant correspondence and legal disputes reveal particular transactions.

Why Kültepe’s merchant archives belong to an earlier period

The best-documented long-distance trading system in central Anatolia comes from Kültepe, ancient Kaneš or Neša, before the Hittite empire. In the early second millennium BCE, Assyrian merchants lived and worked there in a kārum, an Assyrian term for a trading district or commercial center. Their clay-tablet archives record family businesses, correspondence, contracts, loans, and trade. They describe merchants carrying tin and textiles into Anatolia and obtaining silver and gold in return. Donkey caravans transported goods between Assur and Anatolian settlements.

This earlier network relied on agreements with local rulers concerning merchants’ security and fees charged on goods in transit. Family firms and their partners maintained caravans and extended credit. Its rich archives illuminate commerce in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries BCE, several centuries before the imperial merchants documented at Ugarit.

For the wider setting, see Hittite historical context.