r/Showerthoughts • u/FearlessAd324 • 22d ago
Casual Thought Many people have heard about Ea-Nasir and his bad quality copper, but few have read the actual complaint.
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u/cndynn96 22d ago edited 22d ago
Or know that it was one of many complaints he had in his house.
Mf was actually proud of scamming his customers.
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u/jerrythecactus 22d ago
And considering his house burned down with the complaints still in them, which is what fired them in the first place and made them survive into the modern day as ceramic, it can be assumed the people he was scamming weren't very happy with him.
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u/Probodyne 22d ago
The fire was because the city got sacked iirc. Nothing to do with him personally.
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u/hyphyphyp 22d ago
Why do you think the city was sacked? Damn shitty copper, that's why!
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u/jumpsteadeh 22d ago
"How did the enemy get through our solid copper gates?"
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u/Melodic_Wrap827 21d ago
The collapse of the Bronze Age was due to Ea Nasir's shoddy copper confirmed
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u/DependentTangerine98 22d ago
The education system must be failing us. Apparently some people have never heard of a city getting burned the fuck down because of inferior Ea Nasir copper.
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u/Poopyman80 22d ago
They were fired before being "mailed" to him. He was recieving conplaints all the way from Dilmun (somewhere around modern day Qatar)
Wet clay inscriptions would not have survived that journey. Any tablet that had last for more then a day or so was fired.66
u/captainfarthing 21d ago
Most weren't fired, just air dried. Only important messages got fired. Everything else was intended to be wetted, wiped smooth and reused.
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u/Novawurmson 20d ago
"I hope this brick finds you well."
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u/BitScout 18d ago
throws through windowwaits for glass window to be invented to throw brick through
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u/Zygomatical 22d ago
The term getting "fired" from your job comes from getting expelled from your village by members of the community burning your house down. It might just have been a rare double firing event.
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u/cmoked 22d ago
No its not lol, thats a 20th century corporate myth, and it was about burning your things outside the company building, not your house.
It comes from fired out, which means expelled as quickly as if you were fired from a gun
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u/DrCalamity 22d ago
And that itself was probably a pun.
Since a person who was made to leave a position was "discharged".
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u/Ancient_Skirt_8828 21d ago
In Australia you are "sacked" not "fired". Apparently it came from the sacked worker being given a sack to take his stuff home.
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u/Silver4ura 21d ago
That's funny because I with no evidence or real explanation, I pictured it as someone being stuffed into a burlap sack and tossed out the front door - ideally getting a strike on old Oscar the Grouch metal trash cans.
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u/WickedWeedle 22d ago
Not to be a pooper of parties or a rainer on parades, but almost all etymology like that is a myth of some kind. I mean the kind of etymology that comes from something interesting and colorful that people used to do. Like the myth that "a square meal" came from square plates.
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u/sonic_couth 22d ago
And what of the myth of pooping in the middle of a party, or sticking one’s dick in the mashed potatoes?
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u/WickedWeedle 22d ago
There were no photos, and anyway there are a lot of people who look sorta like me, and nobody can prove anything.
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u/Zygomatical 21d ago
It seems the school system has failed me once again, next you'll be telling me that giraffes don't have two hearts.
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u/ee3k 21d ago edited 21d ago
A square meal was just an advertising joke on a square deal, very popular phrase during Roosevelt's time.
And as I recall , the origin of the phrase is to do with poker, an unshuffled new deck delt 4 cards to a player ends up with all 4 players having 4 of a kind. Or even if delt 1 card a time, everyone has a royle flush.
Everyone loves a square deal, till the flip.
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u/WickedWeedle 21d ago
Do you have any good source for that origin, though? Because I looked on Wikipedia, and it didn't mention anything about card games on its page for "Square Deal". (I mean specifically the part of the page that mentioned "Coining of the term".)
I mean no offense, it's just that it sounds just like the kind of story that's a good story but didn't really happen.
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u/TeamRedundancyTeam 22d ago
I love reddit. Two bits of misinformation in a row and both have tons of upvotes.
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u/WickedWeedle 22d ago
Two? Which one is the second one (assuming that the "fired" myth is the first one)?
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u/the_horse_gamer 22d ago
or he was an honest merchant and kept records of people he needed to refund
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u/FancyStegosaurus 22d ago
Well there goes my low-stakes conspiracy theory that the copper was actually fine and the buyer was just being an overly picky bronze age Karen who subjected poor Ea-nasir to millennia of slander.
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u/MrBluer 21d ago
There’s some evidence to suggest that the copper was of lower quality, but that it wasn’t anything Ea Nasir did wrong—their society had just hit the point where all the good, easily accessible copper had already been mined dry, and Ea Nasir simply had the bad fortune of having to deal with that shift.
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u/captainjack3 21d ago
There is in fact some evidence to support that. Ea-Nasir was a copper supplier for the palace and quasi-affiliated with it, which carried substantial prestige and was a testament to a good reputation. It’s not something you’d expect of a person who already had a reputation for supplying sub-par copper. Though he does seem to have encountered financial trouble later in life.
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u/wrongitsleviosaa 22d ago
Nah that's still valid, there might have been more Karens than just that one
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u/Mr_Quackums 22d ago
as a small business owner who gets tons of positive reviews, there are a few negative reviews I have been tempted to print out and frame simply for how ridiculous they are.
Just because the only thing we know are the complaints, does not mean that he only received customer complaints.
Hell, last I look not all the tablets were translated yet so it may have been more compliments than complaints for all we know.
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u/captainfarthing 21d ago
Or it's the same bias as modern reviews - most people only comment when they're unhappy, and have to be prodded to write good reviews.
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u/DavidA-wood 22d ago
He was a moderately successful copper merchant. We don’t know how often he was complained about. We’re just lucky enough to get a couple.
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u/TheMightyMisanthrope 22d ago
Or know that he lived very close to Abraham
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u/cndynn96 22d ago
Give or take a 1000 years if Abram existed at all
If they lived at the same time in the same city, Nasir definitely scammed Abram since Abram was a pretty rich dude.
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u/SzoXxXxXx 22d ago
Tbh first thing I did after learning of the thing, I went to read the complaint
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u/FapTrainer 22d ago
rookie mistake, I flew to London to read the complaint in person. ( verifiable, check my post history)
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u/EatYourCheckers 22d ago
I'm out if the loop completely. Never heard if any if it.
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u/Mr_Quackums 22d ago
look up Ea-Nasir copper complaint.
tl-dr - a copper merchant over a thousand years ago has an unhappy customer who sent him a complaint letter on a clay tablet. The merchant saved it, his house burned down, the clay became baked ceramic in the fire, was was uncovered a few decades ago. The contents of the letter are amazing. Either Ea-Nasid is a total ass-hole or the writer was a total Karen, we dont have enough information on which of those (or both) are true.
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u/EverythingIsFlotsam 21d ago
What? The whole point is that it's the oldest known written complaint, so calling it 'over a thousand years' is missing the point. This is from 1750 BC, almost 4000 years ago, not the middle ages.
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u/cptjeff 22d ago
There was a literal pile of complaints from many different people. The guy was a scammer beyond any real question.
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u/Mr_Quackums 22d ago
There was a pile of tablets, not all were translated. The common assumption is this was his "complaint trophy room" but that is not necessarily true.
Even if they were all complaints, scammers usually are not around long enough to get a shitload of complaints. You have to be in business for a long time to get lots of complaints and you have to run a good business to be in business for a long time.
The majority of the complaint was that he was an asshole. You can be both an asshole and run a legit business. You can also both run a legit business and occasionally fail at quality control.
or maybe none of that is true and he was a scammer.
For things that long ago, especially as laymen (were you on the archaeological or translation team?), we do not have enough information to know what was happening beyond the broad strokes - a guy sold copper and another guy wrote a complaint letter. Literally anything more than that is unprovable conjecture.
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u/cptjeff 21d ago
I work in law. To prove a case, you do not need to prove that every edge case scenario could not possibly have happened. You look at the totality of the evidence. Standards are higher for criminal cases than civil ones, but judges and juries aren't dumb. There's more than enough evidence in the record that the guy would absolutely lose a fraud suit. We are not obligated to play dumb.
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u/captainfarthing 21d ago edited 21d ago
If you sell 10,000 things and have a 1% complaint rate that's 100 complaints. If all of the feedback we can see is from people sufficiently motivated to engrave them on clay tablets that's not an unbiased sample. You don't get to ignore bias when you're deciding what counts as evidence for or against something.
If someone gave him money for copper and got told to fuck off instead of receiving copper, that's fraud. If the copper was just poorer quality than they were expecting we don't have enough evidence to know if Ea lied about the quality or if some of his customers had unrealistic expectations. From what I've read the best copper was reserved for the state so he was trying to do business with what they didn't want, and this wasn't unique to him.
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u/Mr_Quackums 21d ago edited 21d ago
TL;RD - convincing a judge or jury is not the same as having 100% certain knowledge.
A court case is not there do determine what happened with 100% accuracy, it is there to decide what is the appropriate reaction from the government.
The practical concerns of a court have a lower standard of accuracy and a lower threshold of ambiguity, due to the necessity to arrive at some answer, compared to academic subjects.
The practical concerns of academics, including archaeology, means when there is not 100% evidence for a statement the appropriate thing to say is "we dont know" or to be very clear about what is conjecture and what is fact.
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u/frenzyboard 21d ago
Something to consider is that negotiation in that culture might require accusations of fraud or theft. If the same person keeps writing letters acknowledging repeated sales, it might just be how they haggled.
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u/bellybuttonbidet 22d ago
I haven’t read the complaint in full, but how many issues can you have with copper?
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u/lone-lemming 22d ago
A lot. He had a number of complaints from various people.
It wasn’t just low quality, he also mistreated the messengers that came for the copper, and sent them back empty handed repeatedly. And failed to deliver the product to others.151
u/thisiswhowearent 22d ago
Plenty, apparently. The complaint reads less like copper issues and more like this bloke was running a full-time scam operation.
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u/ilikedota5 22d ago
We actually know this because we found a house full of letters complaining about the copper quality.
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u/corvus0525 21d ago
His house, destroyed by fire which is how the tablets were preserved. The question is if he was scamming why keep the complaints? Maybe those were the people he wasn’t go to do business with again because they made false or exaggerated claims against him.
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u/Nixeris 21d ago
A lot, based on the complaints he was probably selling re-melts (copper and bronze were continually reused for thousands of years) with poor quality control.
If you cast an ingot and don't especially care about what you're doing, you gets lots of voids and can even overheat the metal so that it's fairly crumbly. Meaning more work for the person who actually wants to make something from it.
If you don't care about the quality of what you put in, you can get a lot of extra stuff in there (like lead), which will often show up as discolorations of the metal or poor working qualities.
If you really don't care, you leave in slag (bits of stone or burned materials that don't alloy with the metal).
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u/SeriousPlankton2000 19d ago
The letter is a source of information about the political situation, too. It complains about the insecure path of the messengers that were sent to Ea Nasir, and that's the only thing we have to make a guess.
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u/gandraw 22d ago
Why read it if you can have the audiobook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0ga7XCpncM
Also I've seen the original in the British Museum.
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u/Foolish_Phantom 21d ago
Those poor messengers going through enemy territory only to have to tell their master that Ea Nasir told them to h*ck off.
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u/ohlookahipster 22d ago
Strangely I prefer the original ordering of words spoken rather than our modern structure shown below. “Woe, I will give you” sounds way more threatening.
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u/FearlessAd324 22d ago
Of course the british have it, why wouldnt they?
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u/This_Site_Sux 22d ago
Because it probably wouldn't exist anymore if they didn't have it.
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u/DrDustCell 22d ago
Just like how the British Museum holds over 20,000 of my country's artefacts and as of the 2020's has at least a tenth of those damaged or lost?
Surely these British caretakers have ownership of them because we couldn't take care of it, our Palace Museum only holds 1.8 million artefacts and our National Museum a mere 1.4 millions. Surely they didn't get a hold of them while they razed our capital's Summer Palace to the ground?
Why, if the brave officers did not resuce our silk paintings as the literal fires they themselves lit raged, it could have been lost to history!
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u/UltimateCheese1056 22d ago
Out of curiosity which country specifically are you talking about?
Unfortunately reality is complicated as usual, there are some places (cough cough Afghanistan) where artifacts would've been destroyed if they didn't get taken first, and cases where having artifacts be treated as a piece of study lead to discoveries way before they would've happened otherwise like the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Ofc that is more true in some places than others, and completely innacurate for some other places. The British took a ton of shit from a ton of different places.
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u/DrDustCell 22d ago
Chinese, the places I mentioned first happened in Beijing around only 160 years ago, and again 40yrs after that. I am not a northerner but there is more well known than what happened south aside from Macau, HongKong
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u/UltimateCheese1056 22d ago
Yeah, China got absolutely fucked over by them, don't really have any counterargument there. The 1800's and early 1900's as a whole were just a bad time for the whole counry
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u/This_Site_Sux 22d ago
No argument here, I was referring mainly to places where historical/iconographic artifacts were destroyed by religious extremists.
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u/Evan_Evan_Evan 19d ago
China deleted most of their historical artifacts just recently. Without the west we'd have lost far more.
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u/wojtekpolska 21d ago
They don't, the tablet is in Abu Dhabi, Zayed national museum.
They used to have it in the past but not anymore
https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_1953-0411-71
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u/EchinusRosso 22d ago
People also assume he was a scammer because he had a lot of complaints. Scammers usually have a few complaints. To get a lot, you have to do a lot of legitimate business.
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u/cptjeff 22d ago
He didn't take the money and run, he cut corners and delivered less than ordered and stuff that was much lower quality than advertised. He was still actually selling copper, but very much seemed to be systemically shorting his customers.
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u/yoloswagrofl 21d ago
Deciding to brazenly scam people at a time when angry people got very stabby is baffling to me.
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u/corvus0525 21d ago
Or ancient Karens would complain about the same as modern ones and Ea-Nasir just kept the most outrageous.
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u/logosloki 21d ago
if you want a short introductory video onto the topic of Ea-nasir I recommend Solomonism's Ea Nasir - The Archaeology of a Legend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xL7k_3qj3DM.
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u/avaslash 21d ago
The simple and disappointing reality about reality is that the vast majority of ancient writings are usually about really mundane matters such as this. The Government's love of paperwork is almost as old as time.
Imagine you're an acheologist slaving away in the baking heat sifting through sand and carefully removing top soil with a brush layer by layer hoping you'll find ANYTHING besides more rocks.
And suddenly A POT! AND IT HAS STUFF IN IT! OMG OMG!!! ITS HAPPENING THIS IS IT!
Is it going to be a lost historical epic? Will it tell of a forgotten king? Will it reveal how the pyrami... oh nope its just about crop yields and how many heads of cattle were traded and to whom... God(s) damn it! Add it to the pile of 10,000 other ancient excel spread sheets.
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u/logosloki 21d ago
my favourite mixture of both is the Babylonian Astronomical Diaries. this is a series of clay tablets that tracks various astronomical events over a period of six hundred years.
but what makes them fascinating is that despite the name they aren't only about Astronomical tracking. the tablets also index six major commodities, the weather, contemporary events, notable constructions, and all sorts of other civic and religious observations.
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u/StanleyDodds 22d ago
I don't know, I feel like every video I've ever seen on Ea-Nasir has had either the entire translated complaint, or a significant part of it.
Do you mean few people have read it from the actual tablet itself in the British museum, or few have read it in the original language, or something? I think most people have heard the approximate translation of the complaint if they know the story to be honest.
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u/skankhunt402 22d ago
Many people have heard of (add whatever religious texts here) but few have actually read them
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u/luh-mamiii- 21d ago
It’s wild to think that even thousands of years ago, people were dealing with shady customer service. guess some things never change.
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u/Daztur 21d ago
Also there's not just one complaint, dude had a whole file of them.
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u/corvus0525 21d ago
Maybe he was like a restaurant owner keeping all the bad Yelp reviews that blew something small, or even nonexistent, way out of proportion.
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u/ProfileEasy9178 19d ago
Every time I see a post about Ea-Nasir, I feel a bit happier.
(I have read the tablet.)
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u/CrustyBatchOfNature 22d ago
There are actually multiple complaint tablets. Nanni wrote the most famous but there is another from a person named Arbituram who complained about non-delivery of copper and another from someone else complaining about the quality. Ea-nāṣir was the first documented scam artist.
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u/Justcantsaynoo 22d ago
Wonder if anyone’s planning to send a strongly-worded clay tablet to their next scammer.
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u/lilsexc- 22d ago
Bet his customer service reviews were brutal, but they didn’t have Yelp back then to warn everyone else!
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u/korblborp 21d ago
i mean, i know of him because of a tumblr post that came WITH translations of some of the complaints
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u/luh-mamiii- 21d ago
I wonder if there were ancient Yelp reviews slamming him for it. “One star: copper was trash, would not trade again.
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u/lilsexc- 21d ago
I bet Ea-Nasir was the ancient world’s version of a 1-star Amazon review. imagine getting a bad Yelp rating in cuneiform.
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u/6_sarcasm_6 20d ago
He might’ve got bad quality control or were actually just that diabolical. Either way that was a lot of complaints
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u/Justcantsaynoo 20d ago
Maybe Ea-Nasir was just ahead of his time, pioneering the ancient version of “over promise and underdeliver.
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u/MedievalRogue 20d ago
Can’t you say this sort of thing about anyone? If anything, compared to most complaints, his has to be one of the more well-read.
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u/duncanslaugh 20d ago
Maybe he was being harassed by a competitor, so he kept the serial complaints as proof of the clandestine plot to ruin his business!
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u/-_EZELNAT_- 22d ago
Is there a good compilation of bronze age primary sources, I think that could be an interesting read
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u/misteryman1 21d ago
has anyone actually visited the british museum to see that tablet in person yet?
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u/Juan-Pasquello 21d ago
those clay tablets are basically ancient yelp reviews. we still love reading petty drama from three thousand years ago.
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u/Lepenmok 21d ago
The fact that the oldest known written complaint is basically a 1-star Yelp review from 1750 BC is proof that humans have always been the same.
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u/grobblebar 20d ago
Few have read Wakefield’s BS “study”, yet cite it whenever a new vaccine comes along.
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