With one foot on the Tigris and the other in Anatolia, Assyrian merchants in the early second millennium B.C. formed and reformed complex and geographically disparate households. Over the course of three documented generations in Kültepe, merchants formed households in a developing progression, from single households based in Assur, to geographically separated bipartite households in both Assur and Anatolia, to simple households in Anatolia. Such arrangements provide different forms and conditions from those posed for ancient agrarian households. The family firm has provided one ontological point of reference for conceptualizing the interaction between economy, culture and household in the Old Assyrian period. However, a nuanced description of business organization with sensitivity to private ownership, usufruct, and known financial mechanisms remains a desideratum for the field. Such a description of specific merchants, their households, and their commercial networks serves to clarify the forms households took, the processes that created and divided them, and the interactions between households and the larger mercantile community. Over 500 cuneiform documents, including 200 letters, documenting a prominent merchant named Pusu-ken, provide a welcome opportunity to provide such a description. Furthermore, significant portions of the correspondence can be woven together to document roughly a single year in his life. The ensuing micro-narrative provides a far more substantive description of his household and business than previously possible due to the constraints of an effectively atemporal textual corpus of unconnected anecdotes. This paper will review this year in the life of Pusu-ken, provide a brief discussion of the process of the reconstruction of that year and the inherent difficulties, and describe the gains in understanding the forms, processes, and forces at work in the Old Assyrian mercantile household as a derivative of this process. The paper will also highlight the development of research on the Old Assyrian mercantile period in a database that provides a framework to make cumulative progress from iterative efforts, such as reconstruction, and preserve philological intervention.
