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It’s always a good time for a reminder that if you want to argue about politics with me the prerequisite is that you have to write a 700-word research essay on the state legislature of your choice
These are images from a booklet published in 1568. It’s based on the idea that disease is caused by various “belly insects” that parasitize the internal organs, requiring acupuncture treatment methods. Most of the belly insects are humorous, which is a mixture of insects, reptiles, and fish.
Images and most of text text via Kyushu National Museum, Japan.
I feel like people are always doing some form of "we compared the westborough baptist church with sufism and what we found is that islam is much more progressive than christianity." like i think it depends. it depends though. like it depends.
After looking through the evidence, both, but moreso the second.
Ea-Nasir's tablet is dated to 1750 BC, which is coincidentally aligns to the death of Hammurabi. For context, he lived at the end of the Isin-Larsa Period, a time in Babylonia's history where it was a collection of warring city-states. Ur and Larsa were the most powerful of these, since they were farthest south and controlled most of the trade coming up the Persian Gulf. (Isin, near where Hammurabi was from, was in the North and had lost power about 200 years before.)
Right after Hammurabi's death, all the city-states he'd conquered, including Larsa and Ur, decided that they didn't give two squats what the people in the North thought, and started a rebellion.
The tablets in Ea-Nasir's house have been translated. It's very difficult to find them, but the book is called Foreign Trade in the Old Babylonian Period, Leemans 1960, and he makes a series of interpretations that still align with our understanding of the culture today:
Ea-Nasir was hot-headed. 3 tablets note him talking rudely to messengers and traders.
Ea-Nasir sold copper to private merchants AND the temple, which was the government of Ur. The receipt we found is in such a large quantity we can assume the government was likely his primary buyer. The complaint tablets are from notably from private merchants.
Ea-Nasir was an alik-Tilmun; or 'one who travels to Dilmun'.
Where is Dilmun? Good question! Archaeologists spent the next 40 years figuring it out! At this point, they're fairly certain it's in present-day Qatar. The city was used as a midpoint port to bring in copper from Magan and Meluhha (current-day UAE/Oman and India respectively.)
The reason we know this, is because Oman is an old, old copper-producing region. It's an ophiolite (rock from the seafloor that's been uplifted to the surface) that contained a spreading center (think Mid-Atlantic ridge) which forms deposits of copper and other metals as sulfides from the black smoker vents (copper-iron sulfur, lead sulfur, zinc sulfur, etc.)
To produce copper, you have to remove the iron and the sulfur. To remove the iron, you add "flux", which essentially bonds iron to silica, because it likes silica more than copper does. And to remove the sulfur, you add oxygen, which burns off the sulfur as gaseous SO2.
The copper is heavier than the iron and silica, and sinks to the bottom of the furnace. The iron and silica, slag, flow out the side. The resulting ingot looks like the bowl below. And a lot of times, holes remained from gas getting trapped at the bottom.
They measured copper by weight though, so this wasn't too much of a problem. However, if there weren't enough flux, or the fire wasn't hot enough, iron would also get trapped in the copper ingot, making "black copper"; if a merchant wanted the 97% pure copper that could be made using this process, a lot of iron would definitely be considered 'bad copper'.
Switching back to the culture!
Around 1800 BC, the same time as this was going on, the culture of Oman underwent a noticeable decline. Many of their coastal mines stopped producing copper and people moved inland. They also stopped making bronze with tin. This is notable, because tin was scarce in the Bronze Age and insinuates they might've been left out of the trade route. At the very least, they had stopped being Mesopotamia's primary supplier and started doing their best to keep up with the times.
(At this point, I'll point a finger to Cyprus, which was firing up its smelters at the same time. Cyprus is very interesting, but it pertains less to Ea-Nasir, so I'll just wave enthusiastically at their oxhide ingot copper and tin trade domination.)
So we can't know if Ea-Nasir wasn't a chronic scammer, but I think all the evidence outlines a different story.
Ur, a powerful city-state rebelling against a conqueror within Ea-Nasir's lifetime. Ea-Nasir, selling large amounts of copper to the government, and smaller sales to private merchants who complained about being given scraps; a man who was still traveling to trade copper in a state that had lost their monopoly on the copper trade and was possibly producing some less-than-ideal quality.
He mostly sounds like a person with strong ties to his city and culture. Maybe not the best copper merchant, but certainly a passionate one.
References below the cut:
Velde, C. (2003). Wadi Suq and Late Bronze Age in the Oman Peninsula. Archaeology of the United Arab Emirates, 102–113.
Bibby, G. (1970). Looking for Dilmun (Second Edi). Alfred A. Knoff, INC.
Olijdam, E. (2014). From rags to riches: three crucial steps in Dilmun’s rise to fame (poster). Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies, 44(July 2013), 277–286.
Forbes, R. J. (1950). Metallurgy in Antiquity. EJB. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.207.4426.50
Leemans, W. F. (1960). Foreign Trade in the Old Babylonia Period. Leiden, E.J. Brill.
Kassianidou, V. (2013). The Production and Trade of Cypriot Copper in the Late Bronze Age. An Analysis of the Evidence. Pasiphae. Rivista Di Filologia e Antichità Egee, VII, 133–146. www.libraweb.net
Khol, P., & Bertille, L. (2008). By Land and By Sea: The Circulation of Materials and Peoples, ca. 3500 - 1800 B.C. Intercultural Relations Between South and Southwest Asia: Studies in Commemoration of E.C.L. During Caspers (1934 - 1996) BAR International Series 1826, 1826, 29–42.
Giardino C., (2019). Magan - The Land of Copper: Prehistoric Metallurgy of Oman. Ministry of Heritage and Culture - Sultanate of Oman (2019).
Also there's a lot of heritage post blogs because it's very easy to build a following very quickly that way and then you can pivot into what you really want to do which is usually either scamming people or incomprehensible politics. Or both. People like to do both. Incomprehensible politics frequently goes hand in hand with scamming people.
i am all for being critical of academia as an institution but many scholars are actually doing incredibly important work and their expertise is extremely valuable and not like anything you will find from some rando on tumblr dot com. you guys.
as a “”“junior scholar””” who is also a rando on tumblr dot com i think a big part of this is understanding any off the cuff post an academic makes on a social media platform is not going to be the same as reading their actual scholarship. they’re fundamentally different media with different levels of rigor and peer review and citation requirements etc. please please please read books and articles please!!!!!!!!!
Deep thoughts brought to you as I slowly drink a warm chocolate caramel LMNT salt chunk and continue to recover from waking up very ill very early this morning
Two days later I went to zoom therapy and my therapist was like “yeah there’s norovirus going around in the Bay and weren’t you at the hospital for your dad a few days before you got sick” and as always I suddenly felt less of the free-floating guilt about being ill that I know I shouldn’t feel anyway
The five-judge panel also upheld a 10-year ban prohibiting Wayne LaPierre from serving as an officer or director of the NRA.
A New York appellate court has upheld a $4.3 million judgment against former National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre, who was found liable in a civil corruption case for misappropriating the organization’s funds.
The five-judge panel also upheld a 10-year ban prohibiting LaPierre from serving as an officer or director of the NRA, rejecting his contention that the restriction violated his First Amendment rights.
“He remains a member of the NRA and is not precluded from making any public statements or involving himself in fundraising or other outreach,” the panel said. “Neither does the monetary restitution amount constitute a fine. Instead, it serves the remedial purpose of reimbursing the NRA for the losses LaPierre caused, making it compensatory in nature.”
Everyone please get the pneumonia vaccine. It only affects one of the three types of pneumonia but that’s still a lot. (It would’ve prevented the pneumonia I got last year; obviously I don’t know any details of ASH’s case)
Deep thoughts brought to you as I slowly drink a warm chocolate caramel LMNT salt chunk and continue to recover from waking up very ill very early this morning
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