History & Culture
“I shall inflict grief on you!” is just one of the threats irate customers directed at Ea-nāṣir, a shady copper merchant who operated in Mesopotamia some 4,000 years ago.
ByErin Blakemore
Published October 16, 2023
• 6 min read
About 3,770 years ago, a disgruntled trader named Nanni fired off a litany of woes about a transaction gone awry, giving a piece of his mind to the allegedly unscrupulous merchant—a fellow Babylonian by the name of Ea-nāṣir.
Though this all took place in the ancient city of Ur (in what is modern-day Iraq), the complaint resonates with modern consumers, with claims of shady financial dealings, low-quality product, and a serious lack of customer service. So much so, actually, that the complaint letter enjoys a Guinness World Record as the world’s oldest, and Nanni’s grievances from four millennia ago have now inspired a seemingly endless string of memes, comics, and in-depth comparisons on the internet.
So who was Ea-nāṣir, and why is Nanni’s complaint letter so compelling thousands of years after it was written?
‘I shall inflict grief on you!’
The notorious tablet was discovered in Ur about a century ago, when an expedition led by famed archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley unearthed why may be the home of Ea-nāṣir, including a slew of business documents recorded in cuneiform writing on small clay tablets. Among them was Nanni’s complaint. Dating from 1750 B.C., the palm-sized tablet is inscribed in Akkadian, the language spoken in ancient Mesopotamia at the time. Today, the tablet is part of the collections of the British Museum.
The letter, dictated by Nanni, slams Ea-nāṣir for promising “fine quality copper ingots,” then failing to follow through on the deal. Instead, Nanni complains, the merchant has sent low-grade copper, treated him and his messenger with contempt, and taken his money—seemingly because Nanni owes him “one (trifling) mina of silver.” (A mina was the equivalent of approximately one-fifth of an ounce.)
When Nanni’s messenger attempted to dispute the quality of the copper with Ea-nāṣir, Nanni claims, he was dismissed: “If you want to take them, take them,” Ea-nāṣir reportedly said. “If you do not want to take them, go away!”
Nanni is livid, both about the low-quality copper and the merchant’s treatment of his assitant. “I will not accept here any copper from you that is not fine quality,” he angrily concludes, according to one translator. “I shall…select and take the ingots individually in my own yard, and I shall exercise against you my right of rejection because you have treated me with contempt.”
In another translation, Nanni warns that “Because you despised me, I shall inflict grief on you!”
The earliest globalization
The letter crackles with anger across the millennia, and for archaeologists like professor Lloyd Weeks of Australia’s University of New England, who studies metal production and exchange in the ancient Near East, it captures the realities of an ancient economy in miniature.
The copper Nanni complains about was destined for critical use in everyday items like tools, vessels, and cutlery, and as such was an important commodity in Bronze Age Mesopotamia. At the time, Ur was a powerful Sumerian city-state located on the Persian Gulf and an important hub of a vast trading network, but because Ur was not metal-rich, Weeks explains, traders had to seek copper more than 600 miles away in Dilmun, on the island now known as Bahrain.
To afford the expensive journey, individual merchants would band together to finance an overseas copper purchase, each putting up capital in the form of other commodities like silver and sesame oil. These private ventures would then sell the copper, splitting the proceeds among themselves and paying tithes and taxes to the palace and (possibly) temples. In the complaint, Nanni references paying 1,080 pounds of copper to the palace—evidence of the tithes exacted by Sumerian royalty.
Why care about the complaint of a wronged customer nearly 4,000 years later? Held together by bonds of class, personal reputation, and mutual need, this early global economy was astonishingly complex—and all because of merchants like Ea-nāṣir and Nanni.
“People talk about globalization as a modern phenomenon,” says Weeks. “The Bronze Age is typically the first period where archaeologists and economic historians feel that they can look at the effects of globalization. It may not encompass the entire planet, but it encompassed large areas of Eurasia at this time.”
A notorious merchant
As it turns out, Nanni wasn’t the only one with a complaint against the merchant; in fact, the British Museum has even more evidence of Ea-nāṣir’s crooked copper dealings. On another tablet, someone named Imgur-Sin exhorts Ea-nāṣir to “transfer good copper to Niga-Nanna…Give him good copper, so that I will not become upset! Do you not know that I am weary?”
The copper baron’s reputation for inferior product had obviously gotten around Ur: In yet another communique to the copper baron, a trader named Nar-am demands: “Give [Igmil-Sin, Nar-am’s messenger] very good copper! Hopefully the copper in your care has not gone out.”
But given the durability of Ea-nāṣir’s customer service problem, perhaps it’s only fair to give him the last word. Remarkably, a note from the beleaguered Babylonian merchant survives—and unsurprisingly, it’s full of copper-caused drama. In the letter, Ea-nāṣir tells a man named Šumum-libši and a coppersmith not to overreact when two other men come to them in search of some missing metal.
“Do not be critical,” advises Ea-nāṣir. “Do not fear!”
Solid advice from history’s most famous copper con man.
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