How to Find Ancient Assyrian Cities Using Economics

Trade, Merchants, and the Lost Cities of the Bronze Age is an economics paper published in the QJE in 2019 and written as a collaboration between three economists (Thomas Chaney, Kerem Coşar, Ali Hortaçsu) and a historian of ancient Assyria, Gojko Barjamovic.The idea of this paper is to use mentions of trade on Assyrian clay tablets from nearly four thousand years ago to estimate the size and location of ancient Assyrian cities, even those whose true location is unknown. They build a model that ...