The Assyrians had established additional trading colonies among the numerous native city-states of Cappadocia during the nineteenth century BCE, but political developments in Anatolia and Assyria in the mid-seventeenth century bring them all to an end as the Hittites begin to take over Anatolia and Assyria loses its independence to a dynasty of Amorite descent.

After an interval of abandonment of nearly four decades, the city of Kanesh had in 1798 been rebuilt over the ruins of the old, and has again become a prosperous trade center.

This trade had initially been under the control of Ishme-Dagan, who had been put in control of Assur when his father, the Amorite king Shamshi-Adad I, had conquered Ekallatum and Assur.

However, the colony is in 1740 BCE again destroyed by fire.