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RiceAlicorn t1_itysv0m wrote

Reply to comment by Royal_Bumblebee_ in Enheduanna: The World's First Named Author by SirBettington

No, they're making a joke reference to Ea Nasir. He was a Mesopotamia merchant who was notoriously the recipient of the oldest known complaint letter in history — a customer sent him a clay cuneiform tablet complaining that Ea Nasir had sold him shitty copper.

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sostias t1_ityuci4 wrote

That's not even the best part. The tablet about the copper was one of many tablets found in what is believed to be Ea-Nasir's home, and the other tablets were complaint letters as well. The fact that we have these clay tablets means that they were fired. While the tablets could have been fired during a residential fire, I'd like to believe that Ea-Nasir was a sleezey merchant who kept his hate mail and loved it enough to fire it and laugh about it forever.

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Bentresh t1_itzhes7 wrote

To add to this, we have tens of thousands of letters from the houses of Assyrian and Babylonian merchants from Ea-Nasir’s era, some of them predating him by a century or two. Quite a few letters include complaints about shabby treatment (e.g. that a correspondent writes terribly short and unsatisfactory letters) or reference shady business activities like smuggling goods past customs checkpoints — a practice that got some unlucky merchants sent to jail.

While Ea-Nasir’s letters are an early example of “customer service” complaints, his business activities and tablet storage were by no means unusual.

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StrategicBean t1_iu16wt9 wrote

Crazy to think they had "customs checkpoints" back then

I wonder if they had protectionist tariffs too

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Bentresh t1_iu23le6 wrote

They did take some protectionist measures with regard to long distance trade. I'll quote a couple of relevant sections of Klaas Veenhof's Mesopotamia: The Old Assyrian Period.

>The quantitative relation between the expensive "Akkadian textiles", imported from the south, and the institutional or domestic textile production in Assur... is still not clear, but the importance of the textile trade for Assur is underlined by evidence for clearly protectionist measures of the City Assembly, contained in the letters VS 26, 9 and AKT 3, 73:9ff., studied in Veenhof 2003d, 89ff. The first forbids trade in specific types of Anatolian textiles and the second probably obliges traders to buy more textiles, by limiting the quantity of tin that could be bought with the silver arriving from Assur.

p. 83

>But import of textiles and presumably copper from the south apparently did not prevent considering "Akkadians'' as rivals in the trade. This is implied by the just mentioned prohibition of selling gold to them and confirmed by a surprising stipulation in the draft of a treaty with a ruler in southern Anatolia, probably somewhere in the area of the great western bend of the Euphrates, near Hahhum. He has to promise that he will extradite Akkadians, presumably Babylonian traders who travelled north via the Euphrates and came to his country, to be killed by the Assyrians. But alongside such protectionism also good relations were necessary with cities and lands whose cooperation was essential for the trade and the safety of the caravans.

p. 98

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TheMadTemplar t1_ityulvz wrote

So the 3rd millennium BCE version of a hip shop posting bad reviews to be funny.

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