The timeless appeal of the world’s oldest customer complaint.
Around 1750 BCE a customer named Nanni was purchasing copper ingots from Ea-nasir, a Mesopotamian copper dealer. However, Ea-nasir tried to give Nanni poorer quality ingots than he had ordered. After the fact Nanni wrote an angry cuneiform complaint letter and sent it to Ea-nasir. It turns out this wasn’t Ea-nasir’s only customer complaint.
The ancient city of Ur, where Ea-nasir lived, was first excavated in 1853-54 but a later excavation by Sir Charles Woolley in 1922-34 unearthed the Nanni complaint letter among others. For example another customer named Arbituram also wrote to Ea-nasir complaining about poor quality copper. The letters, which are actually clay tablets, were found in what is thought to be Ea-nasir’s home.
Today the Nanni letter is object 1953,0411.71 at the British Museum and The Guinness Book of World Records has deemed it the Oldest written customer complaint. This fairly forgettable commonplace correspondence went relatively unnoticed until 2015 when the internet got a hold of it.
Poor copper memes
In 2015 a photo of the tablet on display at the British Museum, along with an English translation of the tablet, was uploaded to Reddit. People found it humorous and from there they were off & running with jokes and memes.
The “Complaint Tablet to Ea-nasir” is now its own meme category, there are a host of products available on Amazon making fun of Ea-nasir’s bad copper ingots, a 3D printed recreation of the tablet is on Etsy, there’s a product idea to make a Lego version of the tablet, Ea-nasir’s house can be found on Google Maps, etc. The legacy of Ea-nasir and his bad copper ingots have long outlived the legacy of the merchants selling good copper ingots (or selling anything else for that matter).
Times change, people don’t
Perhaps the humor lies in the anachronistic nature of the complaint – that nobody today would complain about something using a cuneiform clay tablet. But there is also the universal appeal that even as times and technology change, human nature is the same. People 3,800 years ago were complaining about shady businesses just like we do today. Times change but humans don’t.
