The Production of Salt in the Hittite Period and its Trade in Central and Northeastern Anatolia

This study deals with salt production in Hittite Anatolia from the 15th to the 13th centuries bc. It investigates, mainly through the epigraphic sources available to us, the major extraction, production, and trade sites of salt during the Late Bronze Age in central and north-eastern Anatolia. If we exclude the sea, a source external to our geographical horizon, Turkey is a country with especially abundant salt beds present in almost every province, at least in small quantities.1 Little attention over the years appears to have been paid to this basic raw natural resource in the context of the Hittite economy, and so we shall investigate locales where salt production may have furnished the Hittite state with substantial surpluses.2