some interesting things about our guy Ea-Nasir and his hate mail
1: the most famous one is the first one we found and it was by a person named Nanni. I just think we should remember the person who wrote it
2: we wound up finding like, a whole closet full of complaints about Ea-Nasir
3: I read translations of several of them as well as suplemental information on Ea-Nasir by the professionals that studied him, and it's been a while, but i will now tell you a summary of his life story to the best of my ability as i remember it
He started off early in his career becoming one of the main copper dealers working directly for the palace, where he built up a good reputation for himself.
Then he moved into being more of a middleman, buying the copper from the outlying city states and then selling it to his old contacts at the palace. And also on the open market. Soon he was dealing in both the wholesale ingots (which is what most of the complaints are about) and finished copper products direct to both smaller merchants and the general public - things like decorated copper pots etc.
At some point he wound up in one of the city states buying copper and stayed there.
It was the island city state of Dilmun, in the Persian Gulf, downstream from his hometown of Ur.
There is absolutely no evidence to say i am right about this next point, but i know how people work, and given what follows, i strongly suspect he got in with the wrong crowd and developed either a gambling problem or a drug problem (or it could have just been women and beach parties, but i do suspect drugs or gambling more)
Anyway, what we do know is that he sort of stopped coming back to his old city, and started running a sort of scam. I really think it was basically like the bernie madoff thing, he would say "if you give me the money, i can buy you the best copper at a good price" and someone would give him the money, and then he would spend that money, and then he would get really really hard to track down, and then when the person finally did track him down he'd be like "fine!"
So he'd get someone else to give him money for top shelf copper, then he'd spend like half that money on bottom grade copper and send the shitty copper to the person who was hounding him to complete his contract. That person would write an angry letter, often threatening legal action, and Ea-Nasir would basically be like "listen, you gave me money for 100 ingots of copper, i sent you 100 ingots of copper; if you don't want them now, that's on you"
He did this a lot. Two of the guys in charge of buying copper for the palace itself (his old job) had to buy good copper with money out of their own pocket after he took the palace money they gave him and sent shitty copper to the palace. And remember, he KNEW what the palace standards were.
At some point in all this he got himself a business partner, and one of the tablets is from this business partner, and it basically says "i'm sending you a good customer with good money who is exactly what this business needs. Please, please do not be the asshole you usually are."
Another complaint tablet i liked is like the third one this author is sending him and among other things it says "do you not know how tired of you i am?"
Anyway, as you can imagine, he burned all his bridges, ruined his reputation, and drove himself out of business. At which point he had to move back home. My guess is he left some angry loan sharks in Dilmun holding a large IOU when he bailed.
Then he tried to start a lot of other businesses. I think he opened a restaurant briefly? He even did some speculative real estate.
Somewhere in here, he had to sell some of his house to his neighbors. All the houses were touching, like, they all had shared walls like an apartment complex, so he basically plastered over the doors to, idk, half his house, and they knocked a door in one of the shared walls to access it, and just like that half his property became part of his neighbors' home. He must have been very broke.
In the end, he wound up running a second hand clothing store out of what was left of his home.
So that's the tale of Ea-Nasir, people really have been living the same stories since always, haven't we.
Anyway I think we should try to remember Nanni's name, the person who wrote the most famous of the complaint tablets
sugurugetos
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