The Old Assyrian correspondence, the earliest important corpus of private cuneiform letters, was discovered in the lower town of Kültepe (ancient Kaneš), near the modern city of Kayseri in Central Anatolia. They belong to Assyrian merchants who settled there mainly during the xixth century BC. Among the 22,700 cuneiform tablets forming their archives and unearthed to date, between 8,000 and 9,000 tablets consist of letters sent from Aššur (on the Tigris river in Iraq), or from other Assyrian trade settlements in Anatolia 11. Although the great majority of the letters were between men, several hundred include women as correspondents; these women were themselves involved in commercial and financial matters 12. Some of these letters, whether written by the women themselves or dictated to a scribe, provide important data on daily life, the role and status of women within their family and the society, and on their social mores and feelings.