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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.
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.
> 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?)
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!
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."
> 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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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
"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."
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!"
Lately I've been wondering if there are any HN threads whatsoever that are inappropriate for someone to come in and say that things could have been done better by using the blockchain. The answer, it seems, is self-evident.
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