Shoutout to the time my partner and I got so excited to see Ea-Nasir's hate mail in person that we failed to notice the Code of Hammurabi next to it
[ID: a cuneiform tablet displayed on glass, with a museum label that reads 'Complaint about delivery of the wrong grade of copper' - 'About 1750 BC (Old Babylonian Period), from Ur'. There is a larger tablet on the left, cut off by the border of the picture. End ID.]
some interesting things about our guy Ea-Nasir and his hate mail
1: the most famous one is the first one we found and it was by a person named Nanni. I just think we should remember the person who wrote it
2: we wound up finding like, a whole closet full of complaints about Ea-Nasir
3: I read translations of several of them as well as suplemental information on Ea-Nasir by the professionals that studied him, and it's been a while, but i will now tell you a summary of his life story to the best of my ability as i remember it
He started off early in his career becoming one of the main copper dealers working directly for the palace, where he built up a good reputation for himself.
Then he moved into being more of a middleman, buying the copper from the outlying city states and then selling it to his old contacts at the palace. And also on the open market. Soon he was dealing in both the wholesale ingots (which is what most of the complaints are about) and finished copper products direct to both smaller merchants and the general public - things like decorated copper pots etc.
At some point he wound up in one of the city states buying copper and stayed there.
It was the island city state of Dilmun, in the Persian Gulf, downstream from his hometown of Ur.
There is absolutely no evidence to say i am right about this next point, but i know how people work, and given what follows, i strongly suspect he got in with the wrong crowd and developed either a gambling problem or a drug problem (or it could have just been women and beach parties, but i do suspect drugs or gambling more)
Anyway, what we do know is that he sort of stopped coming back to his old city, and started running a sort of scam. I really think it was basically like the bernie madoff thing, he would say "if you give me the money, i can buy you the best copper at a good price" and someone would give him the money, and then he would spend that money, and then he would get really really hard to track down, and then when the person finally did track him down he'd be like "fine!"
So he'd get someone else to give him money for top shelf copper, then he'd spend like half that money on bottom grade copper and send the shitty copper to the person who was hounding him to complete his contract. That person would write an angry letter, often threatening legal action, and Ea-Nasir would basically be like "listen, you gave me money for 100 ingots of copper, i sent you 100 ingots of copper; if you don't want them now, that's on you"
He did this a lot. Two of the guys in charge of buying copper for the palace itself (his old job) had to buy good copper with money out of their own pocket after he took the palace money they gave him and sent shitty copper to the palace. And remember, he KNEW what the palace standards were.
At some point in all this he got himself a business partner, and one of the tablets is from this business partner, and it basically says "i'm sending you a good customer with good money who is exactly what this business needs. Please, please do not be the asshole you usually are."
Another complaint tablet i liked is like the third one this author is sending him and among other things it says "do you not know how tired of you i am?"
Anyway, as you can imagine, he burned all his bridges, ruined his reputation, and drove himself out of business. At which point he had to move back home. My guess is he left some angry loan sharks in Dilmun holding a large IOU when he bailed.
Then he tried to start a lot of other businesses. I think he opened a restaurant briefly? He even did some speculative real estate.
Somewhere in here, he had to sell some of his house to his neighbors. All the houses were touching, like, they all had shared walls like an apartment complex, so he basically plastered over the doors to, idk, half his house, and they knocked a door in one of the shared walls to access it, and just like that half his property became part of his neighbors' home. He must have been very broke.
In the end, he wound up running a second hand clothing store out of what was left of his home.
So that's the tale of Ea-Nasir, people really have been living the same stories since always, haven't we.
Anyway I think we should try to remember Nanni's name, the person who wrote the most famous of the complaint tablets
just wanted to add some pictures of Ea-Nasir's "hometown" the city state of Ur so you can get a sense of the setting
here it is today
odysseus absolutely does present a threat to penelope if he perceives her as at all unfaithful, and i feel the unfairness of this, and i think people tend to undersell how much tension at least potentially exists between odysseus and penelope. but i'm also like. his reaction, all speculation aside, his actual reaction in the odyssey to her flirting with the suitors is delight, because he immediately ascertains that she is running a con. sorry that they're so in-sync in spite of the forces that try to drive a wedge between them, including their own misgiving hearts. sorry that they invented homophrosyne ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
oh, you meant they literally did, ok
would i, tumblr user thee odysseyofhomer, lie to you?
this is the only funny addition to this post
Achievement Unlocked:
Nobody Answered
Well ain't that a poke in the eye.
What are tails for? Balance? Communication?
No.
Hitting people.
Use that tail. Be a menace.
Wiggle wiggle, wag wag, smack smack.
Tails are for sending people flying when you turn around too quickly
Tails are for sending
people flying when you turn
around too quickly
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
It really is!
How to see whether a Chinese handmade teapot is well done or not - quality of the spout is an important standard.
cr: 承启 建水紫陶
that last teapot is like witnessing an eternal and important truth
I just watched this with the sound on and i really recommend it because the utter silence of the last teapot is both perfectly predictable and totally remarkable.
I think about this video every time I use a teapot
I think about this
video every time
I use a teapot
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
Your brain loves to rewrite your past with the knowledge you have now. This is called hindsight bias. It makes things look clear that were not clear at all when you were in the situation.
Hindsight can make everything feel like it was obvious. Patterns feel clearer. Red flags look brighter. But you did not have that clarity when you were in it. You were acting with the knowledge, feelings, and instincts you had at the time.
Even if someone warned you, even if part of you suspected something was wrong, the way you felt then mattered. Hope mattered. Fear mattered. Attachment mattered.
You were trying. You were surviving. You were not foolish for wanting things to work.
Be kinder to the version of you who did not know what you know now.
Be kinder to the
version of you who did not
know what you know now.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
Hate it when TikTok farm cosplayers and cottagecore types say stuff like "I'm not going to use modern equipment because my grandmothers could make do without it." Ma'am, your great grandma had eleven children. She would have killed for a slow cooker and a stick blender.
I’ve noticed a sort of implicit belief that people used to do things the hard way in the past because they were tougher or something. In reality, labor-saving devices have historically been adopted by the populace as soon as they were economically feasible. No one stood in front of a smoky fire or a boiling pot of lye soap for hours because they were virtuous, they did it because it was the only way to survive.
Taking these screenshots from Facebook because they make you log in and won't let you copy and paste:
Honestly, who needs a weighted blanket when you have a dragon?
Marie Curie's notebooks are crazy once you think about it. They're so radioactive they have to be sealed in a lead box. Imagine a world where atomic theory is forgotten and a dude just goes "yea there's a book that details the secrets of the universe, the machinations of the creation of existence down to its barest essentials, but if you get close to it you fucking die. The more you read it the more your body slowly disassembles into mush." like wat excuse me
Here are the 2024 vaccine recommendation schedules. They’ve already been wiped from the cdc site. Save them and share widely, especially to your friends with kids.
thats actually so beautiful im in love with the shapes off trees and how clear of a picture i have of this place existing in nature
My resolution last year was to do one thing before bed that would make my morning feel easier, and that’s become a daily habit that I’m carrying into this new year.
Some nights even filling up the kettle and setting an empty mug out for my morning tea felt hard. But I was always thankful for it in the morning.
Other nights, one thing would lead to another, and I’d wake up in a clean house with everything ready to go.
And, on a rare few nights, the one thing that I could do to make my morning easier was going straight to bed and allowing myself to rest.
What stayed the same each day is that I would take a moment to think of what I could do for my future self and do it, even after a hard day. And I would wake up knowing that I had done my best and any effort—no matter how small—was a kindness to myself.
I’ve been doing a lot of “a treat for future me” moments lately.
Our Next Big Eye on the Cosmos is Complete!
Our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is now fully assembled! Once it passes final tests, it will move to our Kennedy Space Center in Florida for launch preparations this summer. Roman is slated to launch by May 2027, but the team is on track for launch as early as fall 2026.
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope in the largest clean room at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
The observatory is named after Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer who made cosmic vistas readily accessible to all by paving the way for telescopes based in space. The Roman Space Telescope will build on her legacy by sending back a flood of incredible celestial images and data.
It’s Time for FLUFFBRUARY!
Well, would you look at that? February is rolling around *again* and that means it’s time for MOAR FLUFF! We’ve put together a new prompt list of words and images to spark your imagination. Each day there are 3 word prompts, and every other day there is also a photo prompt. Pick any or all of them as inspiration for your fluffy fanwork —fic or art or moodboard or poem or whatever strikes your fancy. There are also a handful of alternate prompts at the bottom of the list if none of the day’s prompts work for you.
Whether you do some of the prompts, all of them, or just one you’ll be doing the world a service by increasing the global fluff quotient.
All fandoms, all ships welcome! Tag @fluffbruary in your posts so we can reblog your fluffy creations–and please reblog THIS post so your tumblr community sees it and comes to play in the fluff.
February 1 : ancient | scarf | vase February 2 : journey | soft | worthy
The rest of the list is under a cut - image prompts every other day make for a lengthy post!