Why Ea-nasir Really Sold Bad Copper

The most famous complaint letter in history was sent by an investor, not a cheated customer. Almost 4,000 years ago in Ur, a man named Nanni sent his messenger to collect copper from the merchant Ea-nasir. The messenger was handed bad ingots and told to take them or go away. Nanni answered on a clay tablet, writing on both sides, that from now on he would pick every ingot himself. 📖 Source: A. Leo Oppenheim, Letters from Mesopotamia, University of Chicago Press That tablet was found in Ea-nasir's own house, and it made him the internet's favourite scammer. But Leonard Woolley found 26 tablets in that house in 1930, and most of them are business records. Seven list the investors who paid into Ea-nasir's voyages to Dilmun, modern Bahrain. Nanni's name is on one of them. The Penn Museum's August 2026 study of the archive shows that only four of the twelve letters are complaints, and every writer had invested in his voyages. One voyage brought back more than 18,000 kilograms of copper, which was split among the investors at the end. With that much metal, someone was bound to get the bad ingots. This channel is made on musayko.com, a platform I built for creating and managing content. If you make videos, it's open to you too. Which Bronze Age meme should we check next?