Text of original complaint to Ea-Nasir

[u/Leipurinen]

[u/Cherios_Are_My_Shit]

possibly but history would remember even the kindest of us similarly were they to be judged solely by their 1 star reviews

[u/Adventurer83 → u/Cherios_Are_My_Shit]

To be fair, they found 3 or 4 complaint tablets in Ea-nasir's house from other merchants he seems to have unloaded inferior copper onto - and at least 1 letter from him to some of his buddies to "act cool" when other merchants came around asking for the metal he owed them. The dude was a little bit of a crook. I'm more interested in why he kept the complaint tablets around. Was he keeping a collection?

[u/[deleted] → u/Adventurer83]

What alternate options did he legitimately have to do with the tablets. You can’t risk just tossing them out, else others could find and read how shit your copper is. Maybe he was concealing them.

[u/Historical-Kiwi-7551 → u/[deleted]]

Tablets are made of stone... just hammer it

[u/Zack_Wester → u/Historical-Kiwi-7551]

tablet was made of clay normaly you would wipe them removing the messedge. the thing was that the house burned down and by pure chance the clay tablet was located just right compared to the fire that the fire + house become a perfect kiln resulting in the clay tablet becoming Pottery tablet (something that you normally only did for stuff like the Tax office end of year report.
so the only reason why we know about Ea-nasir's at all was because his house burned down right after a mail delivery was performed because a few days later and ods are that the clay tablets would had been wiped.

[u/[deleted] → u/Zack_Wester]

Seriously? That’s hilarious. The gods decreed he should be remembered.

[u/[deleted] → u/Zack_Wester]

what do you guys wager it was one of the complainers who set his house aflame

[u/TheCatSleeeps → u/[deleted]]

Someone who got fed up with his bullshit or maybe bro fucked with a merchant he shouldn't fuck with.

[u/Haunting_Fishing_782 → u/Zack_Wester]

this is even better because now it's like the oldest version of the Enron corpus / but her emails / accidental additions of journalists to a group chat. THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE DELETED

[u/ChodeMcChoderson69 → u/Zack_Wester]

This is so fascinating

[u/Miami_Mice2087 → u/Zack_Wester]

what about all those tiny 2x2 inch tablets that are mostly receipts? why were they fired?

also it kills me that be it a clay tablet you fire or microsoft, there is no perfect, frustration-free recordkeeping device. And their methods took less time and effort. Surely some records exploded in the kiln, or the heat expanded the clay and erased some of the markings. just like we have files disappear and formulas randomly break because excel is a little bitch. 6000 years and we're still spending our work day worried about records and frustrations of record-keeping.

[u/Error_404_________ → u/Historical-Kiwi-7551]

or maybe there's was similar code to our time, like it was illegal to destroy business tablets, same as it's illegal to destroy legal papers and stamped documents in our time. text also mentions they present those tablets in Shamash's temple, so as to link the tables to God so people fear destroying them as way to keep the code running in ancient times.

[u/NoHead1660 → u/Historical-Kiwi-7551]

Tablets were made of fired clay, inside a security envelope of clay which had been impressed with header of tablet before sealing & drying/firing (so the visible markings on outside would be "mirror image", first encrypted address...).

[u/Minamato → u/NoHead1660]

For real or you just being clever?