Nearly 4,000 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 an allegedly unreliable merchant—a fellow Babylonian by the name of Ea-nāṣir.
This palm-sized clay tablet, inscribed in cuneiform, rails against the delivery of poor-quality copper. Considered the “world’s oldest complaint letter,” it was found in the house of metal merchant, Ea-nāṣir.
Head to the link in bio to learn about who Ea-nāṣir was, and why Nanni’s complaint letter is so compelling thousands of years after it was written.
Photograph courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum