...the great trading city of Kanesh (Level 2) all show destruction during this time.

Kanesh, twelve miles (twenty kilometers) northeast of Kayseri in central Turkey and inhabited continuously from the Chalcolithic period down to Roman times,  flourishes most strongly as an important Hattic/Hittite/Hurrian city, which contains a large merchant quarter (kârum) of the Old Assyrian kingdom, from about the twentieth to sixteenth centuries BCE.

The city-state of Ashur has extensive contact with cities on the Anatolian plateau.

The Assyrians have established "merchant colonies" in Cappadocia, e.g., at Kanesh (modern Kültepe), around 1920 BCE to 1840 BCE.

These colonies, called karum, the Akkadian word for 'port', are attached to Anatolian cities, but physically separate, and have special tax status.

They must have arisen from a long tradition of trade between Ashur and the Anatolian cities, but no archaeological or written records show this.

The trade consists of metal (perhaps lead or tin; the terminology here is not entirely clear) and textiles from Assyria, which are traded for precious metals in Anatolia.

Bullae of Naram-Sin of Akkad, thought to have reigned from 2255 BCE to 2219 BCE, have been found toward the end of this level (Ozkan 1993), which burns to the ground around 1836 BCE.

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.

Six Indo-European Anatolian languages comprise the Hittite-Luwian group: Hittite, Palaic, and Lydian form one subgroup; Cuneiform Luwian, Hieroglyphic Luwian, and Lycian form a second. (Some modern linguists have proposed three other languages of southern Anatolia—Carian, Pisidian, and Sidetic—as additions to the Hittite-Luwian group, but evidence remains scanty.)

Hittite, the most important language of the group—uniquely—maintains certain features that have been lost in all the other Indo-European languages.

Written from at least 1700, Hittite employs a form of Akkadian cuneiform writing, contains numerous loan words from Luwian, Hattic, and Hurrian, and seems to use, randomly, vocabulary from both Akkadian and Sumerian.

The earliest known member of a Hittite-speaking dynasty, Pithana, was based at the city of Kussara.

In the eighteenth century BCE, Anitta, his son and successor, makes the Hittite speaking city of Nesa into one of his capitals and adopts the Hittite language for his inscriptions there.