The 3,770-Year-Old Customer Complaint

Around 1750 BC, a man named Nanni got scammed on a copper deal - and his furious complaint, pressed into clay, outlived the empire it was written in. Today it sits in the British Museum with a world record, a fandom, and a very long afterlife. This is the story of history's oldest customer complaint, and of Ea-nasir, the merchant who kept his own hate mail. CHAPTERS 0:00 A Complaint Carved Into Clay 0:40 Ur, and the Copper It Ran On 1:08 "Speak to Ea-nasir" 1:40 The Promise and the Bad Ingots 2:20 "Somebody Like Me" 2:55 One Mina Against a Thousand Pounds 3:22 Nanni's New Policy 3:50 Who Was Ea-nasir? 4:04 The Dilmun Copper Trade 4:59 Woolley Digs Up No. 1 Old Street 6:05 He Kept the Complaints 7:21 The Long Silence 8:22 The Internet Finds Ea-nasir 9:42 What Survives of a Life What's inside: The complaint tablet to Ea-nasir (UET V 81), read beat by beat - the broken promise, the bad ingots, and the most famous line in consumer history Who Ea-nasir actually was: a Dilmun trader hauling copper up the Persian Gulf at the height of the Bronze Age No. 1 Old Street: the house at Ur where archaeologists found his archive - including more complaint letters How a 3,770-year-old grudge became a Guinness World Record and an internet meme What the letter says about customers, dignity, and the records we all leave behind — SOURCES Complaint tablet to Ea-nasir, UET V 81 (British Museum) — the Old Babylonian clay letter itself, written around 1750 BC at Ur and held today in the British Museum. Leonard Woolley's excavation reports from Ur (No. 1 Old Street) — the record of the joint British Museum–University of Pennsylvania dig that uncovered Ea-nasir's house and the tablet archive inside it. A. L. Oppenheim's translations (Letters from Mesopotamia, 1967; "The Seafaring Merchants of Ur," 1954) — the standard English rendering of Nanni's letter and the study of the Dilmun copper trade behind it. #EaNasir #AncientHistory #Mesopotamia #BritishMuseum #HistoryMemes