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:
He wasn’t just into copper trading. There are letters complaining about Ea-nasir’s business practices with respect to everything from kitchenwares to real estate speculation to second-hand clothing. The guy was everywhere.
The majority of the surviving correspondences regarding Ea-nasir were recovered from one particular room in a building that is believed to have been Ea-nasir’s own house.
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?
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every time this post comes across my dash (which is often) it has even more cool info attached to it
Not an engraved rock, merely a block of soft clay with the characters pressed into it using a stylus, so there’s wasn’t quite THAT much effort involved. AFAIK these tablets were just dried in the sun rather than properly fired, because as @prokopetz notes they weren’t meant for long-term storage; they were scribbled jotter pages rather than printed formal documents.
Here’s another one; it’s the world’s oldest recipe for beer, part of a poem praising Ninkasi, goddess of brewing, for hopefully making it come out right…
This next image is from Tavola Mediterranea, showing gingerbread (yes!) on the left and something more solid on the right; the webpage doesn’t say so, but IIRC I’ve seen the solid one before, and it’s either carved stone or clay properly fired then polished because it WAS a formal document (some sort of royal or religious edict, I think).
Here’s T M’s guide to make your own edible cuneiform tablets using gingerbread as clay and whittled chopsticks as styli; they also sell cuneiform rolling-pins…
The inscriptions are from The Epic of Gilgamesh, so while the gingerbread is baking, go to Star Trek NG’s episode “Darmok” and practice your Patrick Stewart Declaiming Stuff voice.
“Gilgamesh, a king…
(Royal Shakespeare Company Intonation, <ENGAGE>)
Gilgamesh. A King. At Uruk…”
As for Ea-Nasir storing all his customer complaints, thus preserving a record of his own bad business practices, what was he up to? They didn’t have shredders in ancient Babylon, but a couple of slaves with hammers - or even enough Euphrates water to transform unfired clay back into mud - would have done the trick.
Maybe it was a legal requirement, in a culture with quite complex laws, to prove that despite what they said in all these complaints, none of the complainants had ever felt strongly enough about it to take him to court.
Or maybe he just read them now and again for a good laugh at what he’d been able to get away with. Some people are like that…
Gingerbread and Picard within shouting distance of each other? It gets no better than this.
