What’s extraordinary about this period of history is how many records remain from those day-to-day transactions. The Assyrians borrowed the writing system from ancient Mesopotamia and routinely chiseled their commercial trades on clay ‘cuneiform’ tablets. Tens of thousands of these tablets have been discovered by modern archaeologists, so we have an incredible amount of detail about ancient financial transactions. For example, one tablet on display at the Met in New York City documents the terms of a loan that originated in Kanesh some time in the 19th century BC.