Mesopotamia was one of the world’s first civilisations, along with the Chinese, the Indians and the Egyptians. Like the others, it sprang up on the banks of rivers, where flood plains guaranteed fertile soils and rivers provided easy navigation.
Not coincidentally, these riverine civilisations developed the world’s first writing systems. Traders and farmers need to keep accounts, after all. Long-distance trading arrangements are less able to rely on handshakes and verbal agreements.
These civilisations, where large groups of unrelated people began to live close together for the first time in human history, also necessitated laws.
So, trade, writing and laws — the perfect breeding ground for that scourge of the modern manager and business-person: the complaint letter.
So it is that the world’s oldest-known written complaint letter is a nearly-four thousand year-old clay tablet from Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq, along with parts of Syria, Turkey and Iran).
The famed Hammurabi had, just 30 years earlier, codified the first known set of laws. The Code of Hammurabi devotes quite a few of its columns to laws governing trade and commerce.
So, in 1750 BC, a copper merchant called Nanni wrote a letter to a copper smelter called Ea-nasir. Suffice to say, Nanni was not happy, and he wanted his money back. Nanni complained about the poor quality of the copper ingots his agent was being offered, the rude treatment given to his agent, and how he (Nanni) now had neither copper ingots nor his money.
The text of Nanni’s letter reads:
Tell Ea-Nasir: Nanni sends the following message:
When you came, you said to me: “I will give fine quality copper ingots”. You left, but you did not do what you promised me. You put ingots which were not good before my messenger and said: “If you want to take them, take them; if you do not want to take them, go away!”
What do you take me for that you treat me with such contempt? … How have you treated me for that copper?
You have withheld my money bag from me in enemy territory; it is now up to you to restore to me in full.
Take notice that I will not accept any copper from you that is not of fine quality.
I shall select and take the ingots individually in my yard, and I shall exercise against you my right of rejection because you have treated me with contempt.
Cuneiform was a script made by pressing a stylus into wet clay, leaving a wedge-shaped mark that could be combined to make words. Clay being more robust than paper, there are roughly a million cuneiform tablets extant. Nanni’s complaint letter was found in the ruins of a house in the ancient city of Ur.
But only 5-10% of the known cuneiform tablets have ever been translated, mostly because of a shortage of cuneiformologists. Translations to date include many letters between merchants, manufacturers and traders, but also from poverty-stricken women to their generous brothers, and from pregnant slave girls. Even the world’s oldest joke, which is, yes, a fart joke.
From 1900BC, the joke reads:
“Something which has never occurred since time immemorial… A young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.”
Presumably, it’s lost something in the translation.
But who knows what other jokes or complaints from thousands of years ago await to be translated?
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