What?

New Ea-nāṣir lore just dropped and I don't know how to feel about that. I hate the meme but the guy having thugs coming after him for bad copper sales is perfect.

Wait wait WAIT

As someone who hard agrees with all your tags re: tired of the meem

BUT who is also invested in antiquities

Is it possible for you to drop the new lore

So the building in Ur where the infamous tablet was found (1 “Old Street” Ur Excavations VII) was actually full of similar tablets, all detailing how badly this guy's deals went. All of these tablets were collected and put into storage at the British Museum. Typically this kind of thing gets forgotten about, many of these tablets have been sitting there for a century, untranslated or partially translated.

The Nu Tabletum

This was recently partially translated and it's incredibly fragmentary, but it's a letter from the man himself reassuring a customer in Larsa about a bad shipment (a lot of goods were missing). He is upset that the customer sent thugs to collect (which is located in a different tablet). In turn, he sends his own to the customer's home. They are to make offerings at the temple of Šamaš together to symbolically "smooth things over". They are taking an oath.

He later goes on to blame the customer for the missing ingots. He (Ea-nāṣir) decided to employ a third party to deliver said ingots to the customer (all the way in the next city-state in the Sumerian cultural sphere). It seems like the third party either stole or got into a fight with the customer over the goods.

Ea-nāṣir now has to haul his ass to Larsa to deal with this personally. There's a lot of "Why don't you believe me?" "They don't listen to me!" "Please don't send-" going on in the tablet. But from what I can gather it looks like this peace offering (making an oath at the temple of Šamaš) broke down too. Everyone is blaming each other for the missing copper ingots and now the man himself has to take the three-day journey to sort out this issue. We have a name for one of the thugs: Mr. Shorty (kurûm). He seems to be a bit scary. The man from Dilmun got kicked out of the Merchant's Guild for a reason, he's had this problem before with copper shipments from Elam. Either he's the world's worst judge of character or he's embezzling, and badly. This is his side hustle stage where he's selling everything from used clothing to speculating (badly) on real estate. He may have dabbled in money lending too. He's your classic failed finance bro.

I did not think the story of Ea-Nasir could get any better, and yet here we are

I know that Ea-nasir is like a meme these days but it is wild that we have complaint letters from 1750 BC. That's over three thousand years before the release of Belgian techno anthem "Pump Up the Jam".

When an Ur guy / sells Nanni things / but the copper’s bad, / He simply records his complaint for all time / “I got a bad deal / I’m maaaaad”

My Favorite Things [Explained]

Shoutout to the time my partner and I got so excited to see Ea-Nasir's hate mail in person that we failed to notice the Code of Hammurabi next to it

Several months ago, I got a message asking for the cuneiform for Ea-nāṣir’s name, which I provided. I was utterly delighted to receive these in the mail!

Get your own fabulous keychain at this link.

item: the global population at 2000 BCE has been estimated, with necessarily large (and indeed unquantified) uncertainties, at between 27M and 72M (wikipedia has references)

item: as of 2020 CE, one estimate of the number of tumblr users was ~29M in the US alone (Statista; tumblr does not release its own statistics)

conclusion: it seems entirely plausible, given the migration of Popular Tumblr Posts™ to other social media sites, that more people know about Ea-Nasir today because of tumblr than were alive on the planet during his lifetime

“I wish ancient people preserved their writing and artifacts better” I write in electronic signals on a piece of hardware that can’t retain its efficacy for more than a few decades.

Time to laser-print my entire blog on titanium plates and bury them underground.

brb etching my one-star yelp review of the sheet metal supplier that sold us shitty copper on a granite slab

We are never going to give this guy a fucking break are we

Ea-nasir knows what he did.

But more importantly, WE know what he did. Because it got written down in some rocks.

The funny part is that clay tablets are supposed to be ephemeral. When you’re done with them you just soak them in water, smooth them out, and re-use them for a different message. They weren’t meant to be any more permanent than an email.

The only reason we still have that particular clay tablet is because a. Ea-nasir was a huge weirdo who collected all of his hate mail, and b. his house later burned down, and coincidentally did so at exactly the right temperature to bake the collected tablets into pottery rather than destroying them.

It’s basically the equivalent of an email getting inscribed onto a steel plate by accident.

When you definitely didn't rob a worksite

There’s an ea-nasir joke in here somewhere

I have never laughed so frigging hard at a bumpersticker

WHERE DO I GET ONE

So, you guys remember good old Ea-Nasir?  The copper merchant from ancient Mesopotamia who kept stiffing his customers out of their money and copper, and then kept their complaint letters stored in a room in his house, to be found by archaeologists thousands of years later?

Well, I recently learned something that makes that story even better.  Most clay tablets from that time period were made of unfired clay, which means that they degraded over time, getting washed away by weather and such.  Some of the fired tablets were fired on purpose, but others were fired accidentally when the building they were stored in were burnt down.  

That means that in this case there are three options.  (1) The tablets in Ea-Nasir’s house were unfired and just really randomly lucky to survive.  (2) Ea-Nasir’s house was burnt down, likely by someone he owed money to.  (3) Ea-Nasir not only kept a bunch of complaint letters in his house, but fired them to preserve them.

The drama of Ea-Nasir is more compelling than pretty much all of the MCU

Mesopotamian Copper Universe

Babylonian era problems. (photo via tbc34)

old school hate mail

Imagine how pissed you have to be to engrave a rock

Ok but there was this guy called Ea-nasir who was a total crook and would actually cheat people ought of good copper and sell them shit instead. The amount of correspondences complaining to and about this guy are HILARIOUS.

Are you telling me we know about a specific guy who lived 5000 years ago, by name, because he was a huge asshole

More like 4000 years ago but yes. Ea-nasir and his dodgy business deals.

And we haven’t even touched on the true hilarity of the situation yet. Consider two additional facts:

Like, these are clay tablets. They’re bulky, fragile, and difficult to store. They typically weren’t kept long-term unless they contained financial records or other vital information (which is why we have huge reams of financial data about ancient Babylon in spite of how little we know about the actual culture: most of the surviving tablets are commercial inventories, bills of sale, etc.).

But this guy, this Ea-nasir, he kept all of his angry letters - hundreds of them - and meticulously filed and preserved them in a dedicated room in his house. What kind of guy does that?

[ source ]