Complaint tablet to Ea-nasir | Hacker News Reader

Complaint tablet to Ea-nasir

en.wikipedia.org

221 pointsaidos74 comments

Dear Nani

Thank you for your tablet which we received on March 7, 1750BCE. We appreciate your business and can assure you that feedback like yours is important to us because it helps us improve our business. We take all feedback very seriously. We apologize if our service did not meet your expectations, but, more importantly, did not meet the high standards we set for ourselves. We are always striving to improve, which is why we remain Mesopotamia's leading producer of copper ingots.

Enclosed is a discount code which you can use on your next purchase to compensate you for the difficulties you experienced. This coupon expires in 1749BCE

Sam-Gun, Cutomer relations

That would have to be a remarkably prescient customer relations fellow to know that such-and-such would be born 1750 years later.

-:)

I declare this year 1533 BZ. I'm not obliged to let you know what the Z is, but it's gonna be important!

I have found twitter to be the most excellent platform for complaints in the year 2017. Many orgs have responsive social media staff that monitor twitter and are able to make stuff right.

Twitter is better than clay tablets for complaints, though I do admire the gravitas of a clay tablet.

Nothing says "I am fucking serious" as well as pounding out a message on clay, firing it in an oven for 12 hours, and then sending a servant to deliver it by donkey or camel through hostile territory.

Sometimes I use Facebook messenger. I guess it has the same effect.

To be fair, "pounding out a message on clay, firing it in an oven for 12 hours, and then sending a servant to deliver it by donkey or camel through hostile territory" was probably just the way long-distance correspondence was done back then.

Maybe Nanni was also instructed to throw it at Ea-nasir's head or something.

> Maybe Nanni was also instructed to throw it at Ea-nasir's head

Well it does say that it is slightly damaged.

The master may have had a scribe on staff for these things.

You'll be really excited about my pitch deck: Clay Tablets as a Service. Want to sign up for the API Beta?

You'll have competition: https://dumbcuneiform.com

Doh!

touché !

> Good catch, smarties! Cuneiform is a writing system, not a language (like roman letters). We're transliterating - converting the syllables of your message to the cuneiform script - rather than translating.

Maybe the next evolution of this is a service that translates to one of the ancient languages that was traditionally written in cuneiform! (But I guess the transliteration approach is somewhat legitimate considering the range of totally unrelated languages that have been written in this system -- so why not English too?)

Aww man. I even studied Akkadian way back in the day. I should send them my resume.

This will only work if your pitch deck is, in turn, distributed in the form of clay tablets.

Unless your complaint is to Twitter, of course.

Everyone, please read the letter in full. It's great, and not too long.

Of course it's a translation of an ancient language, but assuming it's fairly accurate, it's awesome to think someone wrote something like that almost 4,000 years ago. I think sometimes we forget that at their core, people in 1750 BCE were just like people today.

> What do you take me for, that you treat somebody like me with such contempt? I have sent as messengers gentlemen like ourselves to collect the bag with my money (deposited with you) but you have treated me with contempt by sending them back to me empty-handed several times, and that through enemy territory. Is there anyone among the merchants who trade with Telmun who has treated me in this way? You alone treat my messenger with contempt!

Love it.

That is why I love reading ancient books that have survived to our days.

You've probably already read it, but here's a mobile-friendly PlinyPedia:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15668314

I'm fascinated by how much of modern business practice already existed 4 millennia ago. With minor changes, this could have been written today.

Although now that I think about it, maybe I shouldn't be surprised. This is basically the age of the code of Hammurabi [1], and a good chunk of that is about commerce. E.g. the section on giving receipts:

"104. If a merchant give an agent corn, wool, oil, or any other goods to transport, the agent shall give a receipt for the amount, and compensate the merchant therefor. Then he shall obtain a receipt form the merchant for the money that he gives the merchant.

105. If the agent is careless, and does not take a receipt for the money which he gave the merchant, he can not consider the unreceipted money as his own.

106. If the agent accept money from the merchant, but have a quarrel with the merchant (denying the receipt), then shall the merchant swear before God and witnesses that he has given this money to the agent, and the agent shall pay him three times the sum.

107. If the merchant cheat the agent, in that as the latter has returned to him all that had been given him, but the merchant denies the receipt of what had been returned to him, then shall this agent convict the merchant before God and the judges, and if he still deny receiving what the agent had given him shall pay six times the sum to the agent."

From http://avalon.law.yale.edu/ancient/hamframe.asp

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi

> I think sometimes we forget that at their core, people in 1750 BCE were just like people today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_graffiti

http://www.pompeiana.org/Resources/Ancient/Graffiti%20from%2...

It gets better: https://prokopetz.tumblr.com/post/123010716162/thesparkofrev...

> But this guy, this Ea-nasir, he kept all of his angry letters - hundreds of them - and meticulously filed and preserved them in a dedicated room in his house. What kind of guy does that?

A narcissist.

FTFY: A wealthy narcissist.

Edit: Surprised on the downvotes. "Traveling merchant who imports metals and has a room in their house solely dedicated to customer complaints" Wouldn't the preservation of his narcissism to modern times heavily connote the importance of his wealth?

Was his house known as the "Ea-nasir Ziggurat" ?

Ea-nasir-sist, surely.

Huh, I follow David's tumbler via RSS for exactly this kind of fascinating thing. Glad I'm not the only one.

Here are pictures of the letter:

http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/coll...

Ah that's interesting. It even has dimensions. It's 11.6 cm x 5 cm x 2.6 cm. In comparison, the latest iPhone is 14 cm x 7 cm x 0.7 cm.

So this note was basically the size of a cellphone. Or as wide as a 3x5 card, but not as tall. Makes sense, I suppose. Factors that shape iPhones and 3x5 cards include easy handling, easy reading, and easy manual interaction.

11.5 cm was the height of the first iPhone and iPhone 4. That old(!) tablet fits that, it is a little narrower and a little more than twice as thick.

Imagine, Steve Jobs at al. chose the size that matched that almost 4000 years old tablet, just went to twice as thin.

But by making it so thin one could not write on the edge of the tablet[1]. Imagine the complaints from removing such functionality for the sake of mere thinness.

[1]http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/coll...

Never thought about that, did anybody analyze if the "thou shalt" tablets from the Bible were also inspired by the Babylonian cuneiform ones?

From the debt receipts and complaints, to that..

Regarding side writing, yes I'd really hated broken compatibility. Not to mention that they'd break more easily!

The best part about this is that archaeologists supposedly found more complaint tablets in the same room of the house about the same guy, leading them to believe that the house they found them in belonged to the Ea-nasir himself.

this needs to be made into a TV show.

They should call it the Flintstones or something.

Have they been transcribed and made available?

I can't find anything online suggesting they have been, unfortunately. I'd also love to read them.

The room for customer support/relationship maybe?

Like a clay-based call centre?

I love the inscribed metadata at the top:

Tell Ea-nasir: Nanni sends the following message:

It’s like an email header for a clay tablet.

well into the early modern era, letters were written as if they were speech.

this explains the three paragraphs of flowery hellos at the opening of most old letters — it’s written as if the writer is standing in front of the reader and speaking.

I found that line quite interesting. The wording seems to imply that someone is going to read this tablet to Ea-nasir, and possibly that someone wrote the tablet on behalf of Nanni. In an age before near-universal literacy (i.e. most of human history), that makes sense: Ea-nasir would have summoned someone to read out the tablet. Given Ea-nasir's position as a presumably well-off trader, he may have simply had a scribe on-staff to handle his correspondence--an early instance of the modern PR hack?

I think it's literally just the equivalent of an envelope - a "to" field and a "from" field, so that any messenger in charge of deliveries can, at a glance, tell to whom this message is meant to be delivered, and to return it to the sender if it's undeliverable.

I wonder if ancient Ur had dodgy FedEx delivery guy equivalents who would knock on your door and toss the tablet in the dirt and mark it as "delivered".

"knock on your door and toss the tablet in the dirt"

At least then it'd be delivered (as opposed to the normal FedEx approach of "knocking" by slapping a missed delivery slip on the door).

Shouldn't this have (-1750) in the title?

"Written in Cuneiform". How about Akkadian? Many languages were written in wedge writing. Cuneiform is neither a language, nor a fixed set of symbols. Cuneiform was used in at least eight different languages. </rant>

"while I have given to the palace on your behalf 1,080 pounds of copper, and umi-abum has likewise given 1,080 pounds of copper, apart from what we both have had written on a sealed tablet to be kept in the temple of Samas."

I would be interested on what this joint-written, sealed tablet kept at the temple is. Some kind of escrow system? Unfortunately the wikipedia article does not mention anything about this cryptic phrase.

Basically a receipt probably for tax purposes

This is fun, but at the same time not very surprising. People do complain and so sometimes put it in writing.

Is there a catalog of everything that is a "first known written stuff". Like the first known correspondence between a child and a distant cousin, or the first letter in which a woman tells another woman that they bought the same dress and that's not cool?

It’s true, some of this is frivolous. It’s valuable though, since we think in narratives and achieving milestones helps us feel progress. It's like how Floyd Mayweather just achieved a contrived goal of "undefeated in 50 matches," or the long list of Roger Federer's achievements, all made up "firsts" or "mosts."

There’s a non-frivolous side too, I think. Firsts (and other data points) help to timeline the use of written language and its development. The Akkadian/Sumerian finds are really good for this, because of the quantity of finds and the ease of translation (Akkadian anyway). King List, Laws and other political/governance texts. Epic/mythological tablets and other “religious” tablets. Historical tablets. Some clay tablets are reproduced in the bible, and still form core parts of culture. A tremendous amount of accounting tablets appear in very early periods suggesting that clay was originally a finch startup idea.

Another thing we can glean from these records is how expensive/labor-intensive it was to produce them. If we find that in a certain time period, people were only writing about business and government as opposed to personal correspondence or frivolous things, then we can assume that the medium might have been costly at the time, and/or that people did less-official communication through media that were less durable, like paper or the brain of a messenger.

i can’t find the source for this assertion but I was lead to believe that a large number of contemporary copies of this message were made and distributed around as a warning to others not to do business with this merchant.

That would make a lot of sense. It's similar to the public reference system that makes sites like eBay, AirBnb, and CouchSurfing work.

Some people wonder what is the point of reading Herodotus or Plutarch etc and then you read things like this and see that human nature has not changed much in 5,000 years.

The arabic version of the wikipedia entry has a picture of the tablet.

https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/لوح_شكوى_إلى_ايانصير

Its also linked at the bottom of the english wikipedia page, under External Links. It links the British Museum, where it has pictures of front and back.

It always surprises me that people seem so surprised that people were the same way so many years ago. If you read basically anything written by human hands in any time period, it seems they all had very many of the same concerns we do today.

I guess it's because of how much has changed, both culturally and technologically. But some things are just human nature

I think people are suprised specifically because they don't read anything written by human hands from the ancient world

If only Ea-nasir had put his money into crytops, instead, we would be reading tablets on his 10000% return on investment. :)

Getting ripped off is apparently at least 3750 years old. People seem to have not changed over time.

This is fascinating stuff, thanks for sharing. It's amazing that I can totally relate to an almost 4000 year old stuff, it's kind of cute.

I wonder what artifacts will be found from today in 3750 years? BRB, gonna carve this comment into stone tablet and bury it.

In the year 5767. Go imagine that time span.

they'll unearth partial disk platters or solid state chips.

The only surviving artifact from our period of time will be a single CD-ROM copy of Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation.

At offset 0x4B3B8A of the game executable, the following message is found:

> Tomb Raider IV - The Last Relevation -- Dedicated to my fiance Jay for putting up with this game taking over our lifes,my step sons Craig,Jamie & Aiden (Show this to your mates at school, they'll believe you now!!),also for my daughters Sophie and Jody - See you in another hex dump - Richard Flower 11/11/1999

https://tcrf.net/Tomb_Raider:_The_Last_Revelation

"million cuneiform tablets are estimated to have been excavated in modern times, of which only approximately 30,000 - 100,000 have been read or published."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform_script

What are we doing about this?

I wonder whether the complaint worked.

That's very interesting, thank you

I totally stole it from pjc50: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15669352

Buyer was pissed. Really pissed.

I love the details, and the points he's clearly outraged about. Basically a combination of, "It was dangerous!" "Do you know who I fucking am?!" and "Treat me with contempt? I'll show you contempt!"

People haven't changed really.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com