Thin End of the Wedge

80. Ea-nasir: everyone's favourite copper merchant

• Jon Taylor • Episode 80

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Gina Konstantopoulos, Andrew Deloucas, Gabriel Moshenska, and Steven Garfinkle discuss internet favourite, Ea-nasir. What do we know about the Dilmun traders and their role in the supply of copper to the kingdoms of Babylonia? Who were his customers and what did they want his copper for? How did he become famous in the 21st century, and what jokes do people make about him? What possibilities does this offer assyriology?

Andrew Deloucas's university page

Gina Konstantopoulos's university page

Gabriel Moshenska's university page

Steven Garfinkle's university page


Music by Ruba Hillawi

Website: http://wedgepod.org
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Jon Taylor:

Hello, and welcome to the Thin End of the Wedge, the podcast where experts from around the world share new and interesting stories about life in the ancient Middle East. My name is Jon.

Ellie Bennett:

And my name is Ellie. Each episode, we talk to friends and colleagues and get them to explain their work in a way we can all understand.

Jon Taylor:

In the 19th century, assyriology had a relatively easy time engaging audiences. Victorian society was familiar with biblical episodes and characters. Names and places were common knowledge. That is no longer true to anything like the same extent. We need new hooks to attract attention. In the internet age, memes constantly appear and disappear at great pace. Rarely does one stick around. An exception to this phenomenon is Ea-nasir, a loveable-rogue type figure. Ten years ago, he shot to fame, and shows no signs of going anywhere. What's his story?

Ellie Bennett:

So get yourself a cup of tea, make yourself comfortable, and let's meet today's guest.

Jon Taylor:

Hello and welcome to Thin End of the Wedge. Thank you for joining us.

Steven Garfinkle:

Hello.

Ellie Bennett:

Hi.

Gabe Moshenska:

Hi, nice to meet you.

Andrew Deloucas:

Thank you so much.

Jon Taylor:

Could you tell us, please: who are you, and what do you do?

Steven Garfinkle:

Sure. I'm Steven Garfinkle. I'm a Professor of History at Western Washington University. My area of research specialty is the economic history of early Mesopotamia. And I'm very interested in the related questions of state formation of early complex states and the political economy that allowed that to happen.

Gina Konstantopoulos:

Hello. I'm Gina Konstantopoulos. I'm an Associate Professor in Assyriology and Cuneiform Studies at UCLA. I work in particular on many things, but I suppose religion and literature. So Akkadian and Sumerian literature and religion from all periods, but generally hanging around the Old Babylonian and into the first millennium. In addition, I work a lot on demons and monsters in Mesopotamian perceptions, and also increasingly interested in modern reception.

Gabe Moshenska:

Hi, I'm Gabe Moshenska. I'm professor at UCL. I'm interested in many archeological things, but particularly the public understanding of the past.

Andrew Deloucas:

Hi, my name is Andrew Deloucas. I'm a PhD candidate in Assyriology at Harvard University. And I'm an Old Babylonian economic and political historian. So for my dissertation, I study folks like Ea-nasir to understand how Middle Bronze Age cities and societies conducted business, maintained social relations, things like that. More recently, I've begun to work on reception studies. So I'm focusing on how the ancient Near East filters into contemporary culture through things like video games, education, film, architecture and, of course, political discourse.

Jon Taylor:

So we're here to talk about Ea-nasir. So he's a wonderful character. He's one of the few elements of Mesopotamian history that is in the public consciousness today. And he hasn't been in the consciousness for very long. So it would be interesting just to find out who he is and why he's famous, and why that matters. So could we start off by introducing the

man:

who is, or who was, Ea-nasir?

Steven Garfinkle:

So I'll get us started with this one. And I want to start off by saying, as the discussion goes on and we talk about the reception of Ea-nasir, that I firmly identify myself on Team Ea-nasir. Ea-nasir was a very successful copper trader around 4,000 years ago in the southern Mesopotamian seaport city of Ur. And in fact, we know the house he lived in. When Sir Leonard Woolley excavated the city of Ur, he identified number one Old Street as the house in which Ea-nasir lived, based largely on the fact that a large archive of texts--approximately 32 tablets--were found in the house; most of which relate to Ea-nasir's copper trading business. In his own language, Ea-nasir was an "alik Tilmun", someone who went to Dilmun, the island entrepot, that is the modern island of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf. And that island was the centre of the copper trade in the Persian Gulf at the time. The copper itself was mined on the Arabian Peninsula. It was brought to Bahrain to ancient Dillmun. And that's where we pick up Ea-nasir's story, as he carried that copper from Dilmun back to southern Mesopotamia. Ea-nasir lived during the time of King Rim-Sin of Larsa. And this is a time of extensive warfare in southern Mesopotamia. And it's the Bronze Age. So the import of copper is one of the most strategic materials available at that time, and Ea-nasir's working life was very complicated, because importing that copper from Dilmun was a quite complex business. He worked with members of his own family. He worked with several regular business partners, and it's very clear that he had an enormous amount of specialist knowledge that he and the other individuals who were alik Tilmun, who were the men who went to Tilmun, had gathered, in order to successfully take on this trade and bring these necessary strategic materials into southern Mesopotamia.

Jon Taylor:

So Ea-nasir is famous for being the recipient of what's called the world's first customer complaint letter. Was this a particular transaction that just went wrong, or was he upsetting all of his customers? Did all traders upset their customers, or did all customers just complain whatever happened? How unusual is this letter that is famous?

Steven Garfinkle:

Well, the letter itself isn't really unusual at all. Ea-nasir's archive contains twelve letters that were written between him and his various business correspondents, and almost half of them include complaints of the same nature as the one in the most famous complaint tablets. What I would say is that this was part of the process of negotiation. That, yes, these are customer complaints, but one of the things we need to remember straight off is that none of these complaints involve a threat to cease doing business with Ea-nasir. I think this leads to a very important conclusion about the society in which they lived, and the importance of professional knowledge. Ea-nasir's position in the copper trade was secure, so his correspondents had little choice but to deal with him. And what I think the complaint letters, and there are many of them, revolve around, are the various negotiations in what was a very complex business.

Jon Taylor:

All right then, so perhaps we can widen it out a little bit. So you mentioned that he's part of a community of traders operating in the same area, going from A to B in the same way. Where does he fit more broadly within society of the time, this Old Babylonian society?

Andrew Deloucas:

Yeah, absolutely. If I can jump in here and widen the scope a bit. So Ea-nasir was, effectively, just as Steven set up, he was a part of a business company that worked with investors. The Akkadian word here is "ummianu". And these investors, just like our modern ones, would provide materials up front and have an expectation of an ROI, some sort of return-on-investment. In one of our texts there, from number one Old Street, there were upwards of fifty investors at a time for just these four traders, one of which being Ea-nasir. So what this means is our copper merchant belonged to this huge network of folks making money, interested in accruing riches, so to speak. And these sort of mercantile trade networks were not isolated to southern Babylonia, where Ea-nasir lived. We also have the city of Ashur. This is in northern Iraq. It had its own network that stretched toward Anatolia, what's modern day Turkey, where merchants would trade tin and textiles at places like Kanesh. There are also merchants along the lower Diyala river system. This is near modern day Baghdad. They traveled to the northeast along what's now the Khurasan Road. And there they traded for precious stones and metals from Central Asia. So you can see already that the Bronze Age was this international. If we can use the word an international network of economic systems.

Steven Garfinkle:

One of the things I think is really neat about exactly the very nature of Ea-nasir's business, as Andrew described it, is when we look at some of these large investment texts, which involve up to fifty investors investing with Ea-nasir and his partners. Some of the very same individuals who write him the letters of complaint are also separately investors in those transactions, and it shows us the whole picture is much more complicated than, obviously, some of the memes presented to us today.

Gabe Moshenska:

I'd like to follow up, if I can, on something that Steven said there about the fact that none of these complaints say that they won't work with him again. And this is something which came up when I was giving a lecture to some of my students about Ea-nasir and the meme. And I had a student who was an older student with extensive professional experience running businesses, and she said to me, they'll definitely work together again. Yeah, she's received and she has been the sender of letters of that kind in a professional context. She said, yeah, they'll work together again.

Jon Taylor:

Well, that's all part of the way it works, and it's how it ticks?

Andrew Deloucas:

aspect here that perhaps we can explore a

tiny bit:

why they would continue to work with such a nefarious businessman like Ea-nasir? During this period of time, these would subsidise or invest into these small local networks. So one couldn't simply monopolise over Ea-nasir. If he had the trade network secured, if he had the connections, you would have to work with him. There would be very little options otherwise.

Steven Garfinkle:

Yeah, and Jon, I think that Andrew makes a really important point, because in the most famous of the complaint letters, the one that began the Reddit thread, and all the memes, almost certainly the two individuals who are complaining to Ea-nasir are the merchants in charge of the royal supply of copper in the city of Larsa for the king, Rim-Sin. And this absolutely makes Andrew's point that the state institutions had to invest in these private family firms in order to get some of their most strategic business done.

Gina Konstantopoulos:

One of the points Andrew mentioned as well, when we look at Ea-nasir within the context of other trading environments, the Old Assyrian period is famous for just the depth of its archive, connected again, to families and to individuals. So although he has his own particular fame, the idea of a trader with his own archive detailing his own business practices is so far from being unusual. Very much the norm. He's accrued his own particular notoriety. But as Steven said, I'm very much team Ea-nasir as well.

Jon Taylor:

All right, so this is relatively normal, then. Can we focus a little bit more on Dilmun? So we've seen that it's part of a wider network across the Middle East. It's an island in the Gulf, and it's a good source for copper. But is that all he was doing there? Was Dilmun close? Is it a day trip, or is it somehow exotic and distant for them? Where is it, conceptually?

Gina Konstantopoulos:

The interesting part about Dilmun, which is mostly located in terms of where they're conceiving of it, and the Mesopotamian sort of mental map of the world, where we would have the island of Bahrain. So it becomes very important as a trading nexus when you're facilitating trade to further points. So Mesopotamia, as has already been mentioned, is connected to a very extensive trading network. We're talking about contacts with the Harappan civilisations in the Indus Valley, going all the way through the Gulf. Really extensive, both overland and, in the case of Dilmun, connected through maritime trade. So we have references in Sumerian literary texts from the Old Babylonian period, arguably earlier. But if we're talking about where our exemplars are primarily sourcing, as is true of most Sumerian literature, where they're you know, referencing the trade that runs through Dilmun and these black ships of Dilmun. A number of, say, Gulf archaeologists in more modern periods actually tried to recreate one of these trading ships of Dilmun. And it sank. We know that they were made of sturdier stuff in the day, and were very much successfully executing these large trading networks and going through the Gulf into points further on. But the interesting thing is, we have this very clear economic aspect. This is a real place. It's tied to a very real trade network. But then there's also this idea that it's a little bit fantastical because of how far away it is. So we have it kind of mythologised a bit in Sumerian literary texts as a bit of a far away place. Not quite the here-be-dragons edge of things, but close enough to the edge of the map. So there is a sense of it being a little bit like a place that, you know, people can get to, but do you really know who's gotten there? Juxtaposed with the fact that there are people whose livelihood is indeed trading through Dilmun. So it's an interesting tension where we have the fantastical nature of it set against the very real economic aspects of Dilmun.

Jon Taylor:

Is it a dangerous journey, or is it just a long one?

Steven Garfinkle:

I would say it's both. It's really neat to think of it as that fantastical place that Gina described. And one of the reasons it was that kind of fantastical place is it was clearly a meeting place of different cultures. It is one place where we can establish very clearly that the Indus Valley civilisation is in quite close contact with the Gulf and with Dilmun, as is southern Mesopotamia. And it's this meeting place at the edge. It's a liminal space at the edge of the southern Mesopotamian world that brings them into contact with this wider world. It was, I would suggest, a dangerous journey. Now, it was a journey of probably at least several days by sea. It's less than 1,000 kilometers from the seaport of Ur, but it certainly would have been an arduous journey. I think some measure of how difficult the journey is is found in his archive. In the text that Andrew referred to, the fact that the investments were collected for these journeys on a relatively small scale from such a broad community of partners in the city of Ur suggests that they're trying to spread the risk. In fact, in Ea-nasir's archive, we find a remarkable economic complexity. On some level, he's borrowing money to purchase copper. He's also pooling these investments in what is probably the earliest evidence for joint stock companies that we have in the historical record. He's also receiving purchase orders for that copper everyone is trying to minimise their risk. And what that implies is the journey was difficult. This highlights the professional experience that people like Ea-nasir had, and the importance of the monopoly on that expertise. One of the most fantastic texts in Ea-nasir's archive is actually a text that explains how to convert the weight standards on the island of Dilmun to the weight standards of southern Mesopotamia. They both used the same basic measurements, but just like modern currency transactions, the values were different in different places. And what this shows us is that the economic world of Dilmun, this fantastical place, was quite complex. And it was a meeting place, not just for these merchants, but also for these cultures in contact, and for the bringing in of exotic goods that were not available locally.

Gina Konstantopoulos:

One of the really interesting things is we see, I think, this reflected both ways. So even when they're conceptualising it in Sumerian literature as this fantastical place, like in the Sumerian text Enki and Ninhursag, where it really is this paradisiacal, although it has no fresh water at the start, which is the problem the text has to fix. There's an exemplar just from Ur that has this little digression where it talks about all of the wonders of Ur that are making the city wealthy, that come to Ur through trade. And most of the trade that they highlight is maritime. That these ships are unloading their wonders at the city of Ur, which, of course, at that time, has already been mentioned, this really prominent port for maritime trade. And then moving into how that trade connects to Dilmun.

Jon Taylor:

The final piece of context before we get into the memes--I think we need to look at copper briefly. So a lot of the argument is about grading copper. Why was that so important? And what was the angry letter writer actually going to do with it?

Steven Garfinkle:

Well, I think it's important for a couple of reasons, and this gets us into some of the technical aspects of copper production, on which I'm not an expert. But the thing we need to remember is, first of all, the copper itself was not coming from Dilmun. It was not coming from the island of Bahrain. It was coming from the Arabian Peninsula in the area of modern Oman. And we're pretty sure that some sort of initial refining took place in Oman, but then, usually in Dilmun, the copper underwent a second phase of refinement, which made it appropriate when it arrived in southern Mesopotamia for it to be combined with tin and turned into the bronze that was the most important strategic material. What they were doing with this was making tools and weapons out of it. And as I mentioned earlier, this is a period in southern Mesopotamia of tremendous intercity warfare that Rim-Sin, who's commissioning a lot of Ea-nasir's trade, was at the very center of. So they're using the copper for all sorts of things. But it's a tremendously important strategic commodity. Now, when it comes to these complaint letters, oftentimes in the purchases, the refined nature of the copper isn't specified, and it leaves it unclear at what stage of refinement the recipients expected to receive it. And it's really clear that what's behind the complaint tablet is an argument over of what grade of refinement the copper is and whether it's really ready for delivery to the palace, which is what his correspondents in that complaint letter are most interested in.

Ellie Bennett:

So Ea-nasir has gained a new lease of life recently, and even though he was alive 3,000 years ago, suddenly everyone seems to know his name. Could you maybe explain to us what's happened recently? Why do people know his name?

Gabe Moshenska:

We are just past the tenth anniversary of the Ea-nasir complaint, tablet copper meme, which really emerged in February of 2015. And this is traced--I mean, you can find this well documented in places like Know Your Meme--to a Reddit post that just posted a photograph of the object and its caption, its label on display in the British Museum, posted just with a very simple caption that said, "Bronze Age problems". And then the day after, it was posted on Tumblr with similar caption, something like "1750 BC problems". And these two viral posts are where the meme began. These viral posts got picked up by a number of journalists in various zone. It was reported as news around the world. After you've announced a series of horrible bits of news, you want to have a kind of amusing "and finally" story. I think this is what appealed to journalists initially. It was briefly reported widely. And if you look at the date stamps on these news articles, they clustered after that, in the days after the first social media post in 2015. And then it just endured. And it's extremely unusual for a meme to last for very long at all. The internet is made of short attention span. But here we are, more than ten years on, and this is still being talked

Gina Konstantopoulos:

One of the things I find really about. interesting, and this maybe leads us into the more general question of Mesopotamia as reception overall, is just how, as Gabe said, uniquely popular, Ea-nasir is. I bemoan a lot of the time that we don't get a lot of the public attention. We also don't have to deal with as many the Ancient Aliens people that our Egyptological colleagues may encounter much more regularly. But if you compare--the current nexus on Reddit of Ea-nasir memes, is a Reddit group called"really shitty copper" ... official name ... and the number of, to quote, "disgruntled customers", members of the community are, you know, 18,000 with several hundred messages. The Reddit group itself was created in the early 2020s, I think '21, so it's fairly enduring. But it is something that sprung up halfway through our lifespan of Ea-nasir memes, and as far as I've been able to find, there really isn't anything even remotely comparable in terms of representation of other Mesopotamian popular culture memes or even just references online. Ea-nasir is not only an outlier in his longevity, but also in his popularity, which is crossing over from the Reddit meme world to showing up--I think one of my favorite references, just in terms of we've now made mainstream, is that it shows up in an XKCD comic. So there is an interesting aspect to just how both enduring and popular he is.

Steven Garfinkle:

And by the way, actually two XKCD comics now.

Gina Konstantopoulos:

Really?

Steven Garfinkle:

And I think this helps explain what Gabriel referred Ea-nasir has kind of endured past the short attention span of the internet. And I think there's an obvious reason, which is the way in which the letter has been interpreted speaks to an experience that almost everyone in the modern world has had. We've all had customer service complaints. We've all been on one side or another of a similar dispute. And so it does speak in a really neat, trans-historical way to some common aspects of the human experience.

Jon Taylor:

Do we know who the first poster was and where they found out? Nowadays, you can come across them everywhere. But ten years ago, how on earth would you find out about Ea-nasir? Is there somebody reading Oppenheim's translation or something? Do we know?

Gabe Moshenska:

I don't think it's known. In fact, that's something that somebody ... possibly me ... really should research. Bring this person, you know, the fame that they deserve. My impression is it was somebody who visited the British Museum, found amusement in the object label, photographed it, and posted it.

Andrew Deloucas:

Oppenheim's famed Letters from Mesopotamia--this came out in the 1960s. For me, this is ancient, right? I'm one of these young scholars, so to speak. It's just absolutely incredible to see that folks do go back to this text, what is now ... what is this, sixty years ago, this book was written and finding similar to Ea-nasir, several incredibly entertaining and fun stories and letters written between children to mothers and wives to husbands. This book does have a little bit of magic, and it does deserve a little bit of accolades in this story as well.

Gabe Moshenska:

I'd like to follow up on this point about the scholarship, because, yes, the Ea-nasir meme is all over the internet, and there is a strong Reddit presence. And there has in the past been a couple of Facebook groups dedicated to these memes too. But I think the real home of the meme is Tumblr, which is for those who are not familiar with it, is a particularly peculiar online ecosystem. And it has a number of characteristics, one of which is nerdy as hell. And it's amongst the Tumblr and Ea-nasir fans that you find people who do take their interest from the meme and go to libraries, go deep into peer reviewed journals, who are reading Oppenheim, who are coming back online and saying,"Guys, you won't believe it. There is a whole load of other tablets with this guy's, you know, this guy's archive. Here they are". So I think it's, yeah, it's worth recognising quite how, in some cases, interest in this meme is driving people to scholarship.

Gina Konstantopoulos:

I wasn't as aware of its Tumblr fame, but that doesn't actually surprise me at all. From what I know of the platform, Tumblr is an interesting way of creating and cultivating, I must want to say aesthetics. When we think of things like people really interested in the idea of dark academia, a sign of Gothic sensibility to academia, it's something that, to my knowledge and understanding, really was rooted in and proliferated through Tumblr. So it makes a lot of sense. Maybe there can be some sort of Mesopotamian academia sub-section of Gothic or dark academia.

Ellie Bennett:

So are there any trends or patterns in the jokes themselves? I imagine they may be quite platform dependent, especially if you're saying the home is on Tumblr. Are those different, the jokes you see in Reddit or Twitter or x as it is now, or any of the other social media platforms?

Gabe Moshenska:

I think, to understand how Ea-nasir becomes a meme, of what it means to be a meme, we look exactly this at how these things change over time. What we would think of as viral content joke that everybody's laughing at for 24 hours, and then it disappears without trace. Viral content and memetic content are two quite different things, and the way a meme becomes a meme is through being blended, appropriated, through being attached to existing memes, adapted. And we see this very much with Ea-nasir over the past ten years. Lots of the memes are relating him to emerging themes in popular culture, popular television programs, films. So there's a quite a lot of Ea-nasir/Good Omens cross over, when the TV series of Good Omens came out a few years ago. There's odds and ends like Ea-nasir/Mandalorian crossover. Mandalorian, of course, a show with lots of interest in metallurgy and armour-making and things. So there's an obvious connection there. But it's as these things come out that the Ea-nasir meme recurs, and we see how it operates. And I think a big part of how it operates on Tumblr, on parts of Reddit as well, is it's an in-joke. It's an in-joke that those who are part of those communities have experienced and are part of and can laugh at those who are not so familiar; who are more new to these communities would naturally find confusing, because even if you sort of, you see the name and you Google it, you'll find, you know, references to an ancient copper trader, and you'll wonder, "What on earth is going on?" So it functions as a way of people who are on the inside of these in crowds to perform their in on the jokeiness, and in a fairly, I think, fairly harmless, nerdy sort of way.

Gina Konstantopoulos:

One of the aspects of the Ea-nasir memes, at least the ones I've seen, I find really interesting, is how he's acquired other sort of recognisable features in his meme identity. So at least across several memes, when they want to have Ea-nasir appear, there seems to be this tendency to use an image of a standing male worshipper statue. But the particular one that shows up, and it's consistently, I think the same one, is actually from Tel Asmar. So it's, you know, Early Dynastic around 2900 to 2600 BC, and not at all connected, necessarily, but that image itself is also now very tied, from what I've seen, at least, to this echo of Ea-nasir, within this context.

Andrew Deloucas:

And to contribute just a bit more on the political side, the modern political side, it seems to be, anytime there's any news about copper in any sort of way, his name pops up. Famously, there is a trader in Turkiye who purchased bunk copper in some form. Sure enough, our boy, Ea-nasir comes in in flying colours.

Gabe Moshenska:

And it's not only copper fraud. He's now become attached to sort of any news story, of audacious scams of any kind. This is how he started to lean towards becoming the internet's Trickster archetype.

Ellie Bennett:

On this topic, what are your favourite memes or jokes?

Gina Konstantopoulos:

So there is actually a meme that surfaced when this article about this trader in receiving painted stones in Turkey instead of what should have been $36 million of copper. And there's just a meme of the headline and then the quote from the last Star Wars movie, which was particularly terrible, where they explained Palpatine's return by just a character going "somehow, Palpatine has returned". You know, whenever I feel bad about my writing, I remember that someone made an enormous amount of money to write that line, undoubtedly. And it just goes,"somehow, Ea-nasir has returned". And it's this nice intersection of meme on meme, I think. Personally, I actually really love how defensive the Ea-nasir meme community gets about him. As I've already mentioned, I'm very much Team Ea-nasir as well. And I think he's victim to a unique form of survivorship bias. And there's a defense of him in some of the memes, as well as a lot of the posts of people making what is called the pilgrimage to see the tablet, which is less a meme. And just very lovely to see these posts of people going, "I made the pilgrimage", and sometimes from very much distant lands. It's a sort of trading, when we consider how much of this is tied to long distance trade. The idea of people journeying long distances to see Ea-nasir's tablet is somehow fitting.

Gabe Moshenska:

The pilgrimage theme has emerged, as you say, in the last few years. What I love with this is they all post pretty much identical photographs. And this is no shade on the British Museum. But these are not spectacular photographs. It's not a particularly striking object. The background is sort of beige-ish, so bless their hearts, they come from all over the world to take a somewhat underwhelming photograph. I must say, I have thought it would be fun to hover around that case for a day or so and just see who comes and who takes photographs, and to talk to them and find out

Gina Konstantopoulos:

There's a very lovely photograph. I mean, you feel bad for the person who went to the Museum and the why they're there, but I feel it would be intruding on someone's tablet is removed for study, and they kind of make a joke about it. They post a picture of the, you know, the empty stand. It private moment perhaps. says, "object removed for study". But alas, their pilgrimage was not successful.

Andrew Deloucas:

To think a little bit about the memes and what we particularly enjoy. There's a ... it's now looming in our media currently ... there's a prominent video game company that shares the initials with our Ea-nasir, who's quite famous for some business practices that video gamers do not particularly enjoy. And so this kind of short circuit, or this immediate connection between Ea-nasir and this video game company, EA, it's quite often that fans of Ea-nasir memes liken their vitriol and disdain for this company in similar lights.

Steven Garfinkle:

Yeah, I think it's remarkable the way in which we can fit Ea-nasir into whatever current moment we need when the idea is to express dissatisfaction. To return to the question of what is our favourite of the jokes or memes--my favorite is one of the XKCD cartoons, which starts as a sort of consideration of the modern problem of Photoshop and deep fakes, but it ends with the conclusion, maybe Ea-nasir's ingots were actually fine. And the deep fake that's been perpetrated on us is the notion that he was a bad businessman or some kind of fraudster.

Gabe Moshenska:

I think there's lots of memes that have made me smile and laugh out loud while I've been researching it. I particularly like the ones that suggest Ea-nasir 's making some kind of deal with the devil for his name to live forevermore. It's a very much sort of monkey's paw sort of wish there. But I think the ones I enjoy the most are the ones where to understand them, to get them in, they've removed all the obvious stuff. So it doesn't name Ea-nasir. It doesn't even mention copper or fraud. It relies on people knowing the textual details of the complaint tablet; little phrases like"through enemy territory", which are there. So it's the ones where it only really works for people who are steeped in ancient lore of the Ea-nasir meme. Those are my favourite ones.

Ellie Bennett:

So Ea-nasir is clearly having a really big cultural impact. What do you think this is going to do to the field as a whole?

Andrew Deloucas:

Yeah, if I can speak to the present, his impact has already really been immense. So Ea-nasir is all over modern commercial space. You can go immediately to Sid Meier's Civilization 7; to Paradox's Stellaris. These are video games. His story and his tablets are embedded in this space entirely. Gina had mentioned the Reddit page as well. How many hundreds of posts per week? This guy is huge for assyriology, especially. And it's all happened. This has been a tenth anniversary, but in the last five years, it's really exploded. We can take, for example, Mark van der Mieroop's analysis of Ur. This is a book that was published just thirty years ago. The entirety of Ea-nasir is covered in two paragraphs. And his Wikipedia page today is already longer than that, right? So this historical context that we as scholars embed into Ea-nasir, or this isn't quite lost on any of the fans. Gabe and Stephen and Gina, I think we've all kind of recognised are fans of Ea-nasir. They're smart. They are keenly aware of at least more than passing knowledge of what it takes to have a Bronze Age community, how trade was somewhat conducted. These memes are not made out of ignorance,

Steven Garfinkle:

Absolutely, and I'll follow up on that, because the neat thing for me, and I think it's fair to say I'm the oldest of the ancient historians in this crowd, is that I didn't first encounter Ea-nasir myself on the internet. I mean, I encountered Ea-nasir back when I was a grad student. But it was students in my classroom when I got to the point of talking about the city of Ur, maritime trade and brought up Ea-nasir, the immediate recognition on the part of my students starting, I would say, about five, six years ago. And it was my students then who introduced me to the Reddit thread, the memes, the jokes, etc. And it's clear that there's a wellspring of interest in our field, broadly, even without Ea-nasir's fame. But there's no looking to find out more, and exactly as Andrew said, they're thinking about this in really smart ways. They want to use this as an entry point to learn more about who was this guy? What did it really mean to do business in the Bronze Age? What is the connection between their political economy and ours? And so I think the impact on the field has been enormous, and it's been brought home to me by the students in my classroom.

Gabe Moshenska:

I've had similar experiences with student And I do teach the meme to undergraduate and masters recognition and enthusiasm for this. I was vaguely aware of the students as a that's just an interesting case study in the modern reception of the ancient world. I start the talk with no slides up, and I just say, you know, if I say low quality copper, who knows what I'm referring to? And in a room of meme when I started looking into it, and I thought I'd spend a thirty students, five people will put their hand up. A couple will laugh nervously, and you'll see a few who are just looking around and very unwilling to put their hands up, because they couple of hours putting together some samples of the memes for a realise they are outing themselves as that particularly nerdy type. That is, consistently a high level of awareness and enthusiasm. Yeah, as you say, amongst archaeology students, essentially. couple of slides on a PowerPoint about digital public archaeology. Those couple of slides became a sort of a avalanche of obsession and lost weekends in the stranger depths of the internet. And when I was working on this, I was guided by a few students who I knew were extremely online, who were explaining to me some of the things I hadn't quite understood, and pointed me towards places I could find out more.

Steven Garfinkle:

really wonderful discussions of this individual that are taking place.

Andrew Deloucas:

Beautifully said.

Gabe Moshenska:

The concern that I developed while I was researching the meme is that there are aspects of the meme and aspects of the way, and that's it is represented visually in particular, which suggests that people are drawing on long standing anti-Arab prejudices and stereotypes. As mentioned before, the visual symbol of Ea-nasir has now been stabilised around the standing figurines. But in the past, you see a lot more cartoons and people's own images, and they tend towards, like, 19th century racists cartoons. This is an area of concern, particularly because there is scholarship by Arab authors about how there are few, if any, positive or even non-negative representations of people from that area of the world. And many in particular, that are not falling into the stereotypes of cheating peddlers and people who try to defraud you. So my concern is that when we encourage the use of the meme, when we play with the meme, we're playing into harmful, longstanding Western attitudes towards the people of that part of the world.

Gina Konstantopoulos:

I do think it's heartening that, as I understand the meme itself, has moved a bit more towards a loving defense, in some ways, of Ea-nasir. That this recasting of him a bit as this trickster archetype of the internet. I mean, I would echo, I think what's already been said that I think it's a good case for how compelling Mesopotamia is, and also for how much students and individuals, nearly everyone, can find micro-history, in a sense of centring history on individual stories, individual letters. And you see that as well, even in people talking about Ea-nasir. They get interested in other letters that get posted. I remember encountering someone reposting a ... I think it's a student letter complaining about the poor quality of his clothing from early Old Babylonian period. So this variant of a complaint letter in a different context, branching out an interest there. I do think that when we look at popular attention, I've always been more concerned about things like Ancient Aliens, which again, affects Egypt, maybe a bit more. But this idea of well, we have to question the great achievements of other civilisations when they happen to come from non-western contexts, being very much what underlies Ancient Aliens. I'll stop myself there, because then this will get into my entire disgruntlement with the Ancient Alien show, which is longstanding and well-deserved Definitely a bit of a tangent.

Jon Taylor:

Another episode.

Ellie Bennett:

So we've talked about Ea-nasir as a meme, as the basis for jokes, as a basis for poking fun at modern culture and modern moments. What do you think is in Ea-nasir's future? In my mind, I'm wondering if maybe he may be the basis for some kind of TV show or his own standalone video game.

Andrew Deloucas:

I personally would love to see an epic. So I recently, candidly, I've watched it several times, but I've re-watched recently FX's Shogun, just mouth agape. Now this is a show for political intrigue and anyone interested in historical dramas. And it's clear to me that we know how to make these stories shine, and this is somewhere where Ea-nasir could really become such a pivotal, interesting, historically-influenced character in a show like this. He's really endemic of Ur in how it ran during the Bronze Age period. This was an economic centre created in an environmental space that can feel otherworldly, as well as home for many sorts of folks. I think immediately of the bayous of Louisiana, the Venetian lagoons, or even the Kanto Plain in which Tokyo belongs. Ur existed in this wild space, this frontier of economy and politics that could really shine with something like a beautiful, ten hour epic.

Gina Konstantopoulos:

I would love to see Ea-nasir show up. I'd love to see Mesopotamia as a whole. I've told my students a number of times that I keep holding out hope, although I think this is dwindling, that we might get some sort of next Assassin's Creed set properly in late Assyria. Assyria versus Babylonia. We can go for the end of the Sargonid period. Or there are so many periods where we have a lot of really interesting political engagement and drama that would make for an excellent Rome style, or, I don't know, Game of Thrones before it got terrible, let's say type of long-form storytelling. Here's hoping.

Steven Garfinkle:

And I think those of us who work in the related fields of Assyriology and Mesopotamian studies, we long for that kind of treatment. But I also here want to echo the concern that Gabe brought I also worry about how Hollywood in general, the way in which Western content studios have treated the Middle East. And it's going to take a very sensitive showrunner not to buy into some of the dangerous tropes that Gabe was talking about earlier.

Andrew Deloucas:

I think that's exactly right. And there are a number of shows in recent years where these exact issues have occurred.

Gina Konstantopoulos:

No, I agree entirely. A movie that comes to mind, if anyone is familiar with the Prince of Persia movie that they did. It's a good distillation of a lot of the bad that we could get, just starting with the casting and going from there, in terms of just all of the the tropes that we would be concerned about being manifest. I agree it's something I'd love to see, but with the concern of how that would be manifest.

Gabe Moshenska:

I would also love to see a wonderful ten hour epic. But on a smaller scale, I really enjoy my merchandise. I haven't bought much, but students over the years have bought me all kinds of crazy things off Etsy. I have a colleague who teaches wearing an Ea-nasir T-shirt. I just wondered, how many of you own any Ea-nasir swag, or are willing to admit to it?

Steven Garfinkle:

I've got an Ea-nasir mug that a couple of my TAs got for me. That's"Ea-nasir's fine quality copper", and that's what I bring my coffee to class in.

Gina Konstantopoulos:

I have an Ea-nasir shirt. Similarly,"Ea-nasir's fine quality copper".

Andrew Deloucas:

I personally don't own any, but there's a sticker that I've seen floating around Etsy that I absolutely love. It says "well-behaved copper ingot merchants rarely make history". I think this is just so fun.

Gabe Moshenska:

That is one of my favourites. I think along with "I went to Ur and that's through enemy territory, and all I got was this low-quality copper."

Andrew Deloucas:

Brilliant.

Gabe Moshenska:

So yeah, I think we need more merchandise, more things that we can decorate our offices with. Personally, I'm still holding out for a 3D printed model of the tablet itself. I believe the digital version is available. I think the British Museum has created that. I just need to find somebody with a 3D printer and the know-how, because I want one of those printed, of course, in copper.

Gina Konstantopoulos:

The folks on the Reddit have definitely 3D printed the tablet. You do see them pop up in posts from time to time.

Jon Taylor:

Okay, well, that's a nice segue, perhaps to a more imminent future in that, I don't know if you're aware of this, but the British Museum is planning a massive re-display, so there will be a new Babylonian gallery. Gabe, you described the existing display as not particularly dramatic. What would you like to see in the new display? How can we best show off Ea-nasir to this new loving audience?

Gabe Moshenska:

I'm not looking for anything garish or playing too much into memes. I don't think that would be in keeping with the spirit of the institution. What I would like is a recognition of the meme as part of this, and something which makes admirers who make the pilgrimage feel recognised. Make them feel that the Museum welcomes them and acknowledges them, and to find ways, then, yes, of drawing out that interest into a broader interest in the period, the area, and opportunities to engage with the scholarship. I think that would be a really wonderful outcome. And, of course, quite a tall order for a design, which I'm sure has been pulled many different ways at once.

Steven Garfinkle:

I would add that what I'd love to see as well is as much as we're emphasizing the famous complaint tablet, and that's clearly the centerpiece of an imagined future for the display, I'd love to see some other exemplars displayed along with it; with other letters that were sent to Ea-nasir or other similar types of letters from the period, so that we see that this, in and of itself, may be a paradigmatic example, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. And it was part of an active tradition of commercial letter writing that existed at the time.

Andrew Deloucas:

Yeah, and to make a little bit of exception to Ea-nasir for having such extensive archaeological information about the city of Ur, for having thousands of tablets to comb over in the British Museum alone, let alone anywhere else in the world. Ea-nasir's dossier, this collection of 26 or 32 tablets, really is pretty special. We do not have such a close quartered amount of text that detail, effectively a man's entire business network in such a way. There is certainly a way to present Ea-nasir as a person, as a part of his times, in a way where suddenly our museum-goers, our visitors, are looking around too and saying, "Well, what's the story over here at Ashur? What's the story over here at Nippur?" in a way that could be really exploratory and engaging.

Gabe Moshenska:

That highlights one of the most powerful opportunities that the meme creates, which is so much of our work in education and in engagement, is to try to get people in the present to think themselves into the past. To break down those barriers of understanding of the past as humans with lives, interests, concerns. So I think anywhere where we found an opportunity like this, it's a wonderful thing, and it's too good opportunity not to exploit, to encourage people to learn, to engage, to think about the ancient world in these very human, very practical terms.

Ellie Bennett:

So I wanted to ask as kind of our final point, can you think of anyone who should get the Ea-nasir treatment? ,

Andrew Deloucas:

If anyone is interested in the drama, the flair for economic, political and social drama that Ea-nasir letters tend to have, you don't need to go much further. The Old Assyrian letter corpus is monumental. We have 23,000 letters and documents for you guys to comb through. And what's really special, you have smuggling, revenge stories, lawsuits, failed enterprises, anything that you could possibly want to find in the ancient world. These letters really seem to have it. As for the cancel culture that's a little bit behind Ea-nasir, I'll leave that for folks who want to make their own informed decisions.

Gina Konstantopoulos:

We have a family of exorcists at Ashur that I've always thought deserve more love, but it's more a group, so I think it's a little less likely to become memed.

Steven Garfinkle:

King Shulgi of the Third Dynasty of Ur is a remarkable figure about whom we have this fantastic, essentially mythic tradition. But in terms of the way in which the world has lionised and explored certain great leaders of the past, I think Shulgi is widely unrecognized.

Jon Taylor:

I would like to ask, do you have any publications that we should know about? Where can we learn more about Ea-nasir? Anything that's come out, or anything in the pipeline that we should look forward to?

Steven Garfinkle:

Earlier this year, I published a co-authored article with Seth Richardson in the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, entitled "Community and state violence in Middle Bronze Age Mesopotamia". And the article does touch on Ea-nasir and the famous complaint letter, in order to make a larger argument about the fact that individuals involved in that economy at that time in the Bronze Age were much less concerned about violent punishment and much more concerned about the reputational harm that might come from not doing business in the right way. And it sort of frames the complaint letter in those terms that I think gives us a little bit more of an emic understanding of what's going on in the actual complaint letter.

Gabe Moshenska:

I have an article coming out sometime in the near future, which is a study of the Ea-nasir meme, the history of the meme, and some reflections on it. And that draws on lots of examples. I've got some mosaic images where I've just bunged hundreds of different memes that I found on a few pages, just so I don't feel like I'm focusing too much on any one. And it also includes lots of interesting insights and quotes that various social media users were kind enough to allow me permission to quote in the article. So I am very grateful to them. That's going to be published in the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology. And it will be published behind a paywall, which I apologise for. But this is also a point for those who are not, perhaps, so familiar with such things--please, if you want a copy of this, email me, and I would gladly send you this. And this goes for most researchers who publish; almost always thrilled to hear from people who would like a copy of their article.

Jon Taylor:

quick note to the Agade list, just to alert people that this has appeared in the kind of publication that assyriologists tend not to monitor, but would be interested in.

Andrew Deloucas:

I don't have any publications coming out in the near future. However, I am quite active as a political historian. So for folks who are listening in and have questions, of course, email works. I'm quite active on the subreddit Ask historians. So if you ask about Bronze Age, Ea-nasir, those themes, I find those questions and try my best to answer them. You can also find me on Bluesky. I've interacted and answered questions from folks through those venues as well.

Jon Taylor:

Super. Well, thank you very much everyone.

Gina Konstantopoulos:

I have a older article or two that talks about this more kind of conceptual idea of the the sea and Dilmun, as you know, a far-away place. And again, unfortunately, those are either in edited volumes or journals, but I'm very, very happy to send them to people. A more recent publication that's more on reception than on a series that I'll point out is there's a series starting up on the Library of Babylonian Literature being published through Bloomsbury, which is kind of, I would say, a cross between a Loeb's classic and a Norton critical edition of, currently, Akkadian texts. So Enuma Elish, the Babylonian epic of creation,

Ellie Bennett:

Yes. Thank you everyone. came out fairly recently. So it includes a new translation with the Akkadian of this epic. But then, of the accompanying essays mine is on reception, particularly of Enuma Elish, but how it shows up in DND, metal bands ... I don't listen to a lot of metal. And it's ... the series is entirely open access, so you can find it and download it without having to email anyone. Thanks so much.

Gina Konstantopoulos:

Thank you so much. Jon, this has been a lot of fun.

Steven Garfinkle:

Absolutely.

Ellie Bennett:

We’d also like to thank our patrons: Enrique Jiménez, Jana Matuszak, Nancy Highcock, Jay C, Rune Rattenborg, Woodthrush, Elisa Rossberger, Mark Weeden, Jordi Mon Companys, Thomas Bolin, Joan Porter MacIver, John MacGinnis, Andrew George, Yelena Rakic, Zach Rubin, Sabina Franke, Shai Gordin, Aaron Macks, Maarja Seire, Jaafar Jotheri, Morgan Hite, Chikako Watanabe, Mark McElwaine, Jonathan Blanchard Smith, Kliment Ohr, Christina Tsouparopoulou, TT, Melanie Gross, Claire Weir, Marc Veldman,

Jon Taylor:

Bruno Biermann, Faimon Roberts, Jason Moser, Pavla Rosenstein, Müge Durusu-Tanrıöver, Tate Paulette, Willis Monroe, Toby Wickenden, Emmert Clevenstine, Barbara Porter,

Ellie Bennett:

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Jon Taylor:

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Ellie Bennett:

We really appreciate your support, which goes towards providing translations of some episodes in Arabic and Turkish. Thanks of course to the lovely people who have worked on the translations on a voluntary basis or for well below the market rate.

Jon Taylor:

For Arabic, thanks in particular to Zainab Mizyidawi, as well as Lina Meerchyad, May Al-Aseel, and Wasim Khatabe. For Turkish, thank you to Pinar Durgun and Nesrin Akan.

Ellie Bennett:

And thank you for listening to Thin End of the Wedge. If you enjoy what we do, and you would like to help make these podcasts available in Middle Eastern languages, please consider joining our Patreon family. You can find us at patreon.com/wedgepod.

Jon Taylor:

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