(Kultepe) A tell site in Cappadocia, central Turkey (Anatolia), a center of Assyrian merchant colony, or karum, of Kanesh (Kanish). It was a Bronze Age city at which a colony of Assyrian merchants set up the trading organization, the karum, to control and foster the trade, especially of metals, between Anatolia and Mesopotamia. It is the best-documented of these sites, with correspondence written in Assyrian cuneiform on clay tablets and constituting the oldest surviving records from Turkey. Nearly 15,000 cuneiform tablets, known as Cappadocian, relating day-to-day activities and business transactions. Supplemented by the evidence from the houses and burials revealed by excavation it throws invaluable light on the country immediately before the rise of the Hittites. The karum was destroyed by fire in the early 1st millennium BC and the trading colony ceased to exist. Excavations in the karum have revealed houses separated by streets and alleys and workshops which suggest that it was also important as an industrial center for metalworking. The associated city had a double fortification and enclosed a palace complex and other public buildings including temples.