ok last thing. but what people fundamentally need to get through their heads is the significance of gaza fundraisers not being the same as like mutual aid when you're helping someone get groceries, because it is a genocide. there is insane deliberate scarcity and prices are unmanageable, because there is nowhere nearly enough for everyone, so only people who can pay can eat. and what positioning individual fundraisers as the only course of action does is quite simply give a tiny percentage of random people whose fundraisers take off the ability to pay those prices while thousands of others can't. and every one of those thousands of people without a fundraiser is suffering through the same inconceivably horrific reality. it is giving a few completely desperate people out of hundreds of thousands a slightly more favorable position in a horrific war economy of imposed scarcity. and what grassroots community kitchens do is try to mitigate in some small way that inconceivable hierarchy of who can pay and who can't, by stretching ingredients as far as they can last to cook meals at large scale and give them out at no cost. and obviously people are still going to send money to their friends and families because this is hell what else are we supposed to do but please just think about that before promoting endless individual fundraisers as somehow the most ethical way to help
Operation Olive Branch has a spreadsheet dedicated to mutual aid, local distro, community kitchens, etc. in Gaza.
This is a good place to start if seeking to donate to a community resilience action. Just contact the group(s) directly to make sure they are still active. Life in Gaza and Palestine is full of uncertainty.
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).
guy on the subway with one ear pierced, little gold hoop. other guy on the subway very quickly and subtly googling "which one is the gay ear". it is not the gay ear. visible disappointment on his face as he puts his phone away.
*guy who has never heard of Hamilton* I don’t know why you guys are all shipping random founding fathers with each other and not Lewis and Clark who were definitely fucking in a tent every chance they got on that trip Brokeback Mountain style
Listen -- you're a good defender and your pussy is fantastic, but that's not what our team needs right now. We're trading you to Greater Boston in exchange for someone who has a car.
Kind of fucking nuts how often people seem to forget that some of the biggest [western] celebrities esp pop stars were of color. The sheer amnt of people ive seen who didn't know freddie mercury was indian or that michael jackson was black. or that prince was black. Not as popular but also how martin gore is half black (similarly i vaguely recall reading that dave gahan's father was "of malaysian descent" but i am less sure of that info) idk it's just. I dunno. sad
Okay tbf even martin gore didn't know he was half black until he was expecting his first child LMFAO but my point is it just makes me so sad that there's so many people out there who think they're white
Something about the bastardization of the story time and time again proves that nobody in power really cares about the people who would resonate with King’s Carrie White. A girl so ugly and repulsive she’s been removed from her own story. The societal need for women and girls to be constantly perceived as attractive is what fuels a fair amount of her torment in the book, but that person isn’t even allowed to exist on the screen. We cannot empathize with her; it isn’t allowed. It’s fascinating to me.
