It’s not personal, Nanni, it’s strictly business – The Greatest Copper Merchant in the Ancient World

I’m sure everyone reading this has experienced bad customer service when purchasing something, whether that’s during purchase, delivery, or using the item once you have it. Nowadays, it’s very easy to express your dissatisfaction with it, as you can easily email, call, go in person, or leave a review expressing your anger and disappointment. However, that was not quite the case in the ancient world, where it was rather more difficult to leave written feedback. Paper is quite a modern material, and prior to it, nations had to use many different ways of recording information. For example clay tablets, written on while still fresh, could harden with the desired information and get sent off or filed away wherever they were wanted. Papyrus could be manufactured and pressed into parchment for writing, and then turned into scrolls or books for easy record-holding.

As such, to go out of your way to make one of these clay tablets would be considerable effort and time. This story is one of several dissatisfied customers many millennia before the invention of emails and review websites, who were so upset with their purchases that they sent their dissatisfaction all the way back to the merchant they purchased from.

Figure 1: The location of Ur within the modern day borders of Iraq. (Wikimedia Commons, 2026).

In the ancient city state of Ur (figure 1), I take you back to the 1,750s BCE where we meet the greatest copper merchant in the world. Ea-nāṣir is his name, and he was a trader in metal goods and the titular copper that we will be focusing on. Ea-nāṣir often made trips outside of Ur, such as to the neighbouring empires and city-states of the Mesopotamia region where Ur was located, to sell his wares. He was part of a trade group called alik Tilmun, or "Dilmun traders" (Konstantopoulos, 2021).

Figure 2: A possible layout of Ea-nāṣir's house, as discovered during an excavation of Ur. (Wikimedia Commons, 2026).

The first of our unhappy chappies is a man called Nanni. Now, on this particular occasion, Ea-nāṣir had travelled to the civilisation of Dilmun to collect copper ingots before returning to Mesopotamia to sell them for a profit. Nanni agreed to purchase some of said ingots, and sent one of his servants to collect them with payment. However, to his no doubt abject horror, he realised the copper was of poor grade and substandard, and he didn’t accept the transaction (British Museum, 2026). Additionally, his servant was treated rudely during the trade, and even though he had paid for the copper he did not accept it and would no longer do business with Ea-nāṣir since he withheld the money and copper from him (Deron, 2018).

Figure 3: One side of Nanni's complaint tablet. (British Museum, 2026).

Our second dissatisfied customer is a man named Arbituram, who also wrote to our favourite copper merchant about not receiving copper that he had paid for. Apparently, Arbituram paid for some copper from our man, but instead of sending it to him, he instead sold it again to someone else. This was only the first of two letters Arbituram sent to Ea-nāṣir, as he later sent a follow-up letter accusing Ea-nāṣir of selling the copper to a different person instead of directly sending it to Arbituram, and demanding that Ea-nāṣir rescind that deal and send it to him immediately (Killgrove, 2018).

Figure 4: Our legendary boy himself... or maybe, at least. (Reddit, 2024).

Arbituram and the second customer were not the only people to be slighted by this double dealing by Ea-nāṣir. Further correspondence by a man named Appa exasperatedly asks him to only send good quality copper to a customer. Someone named Imgur-Sin also requests only good quality copper to the same individual. Even Ea-nāṣir’s potential business partners grew tired of his copper antics, with an individual named Ilsu-ellatsu pleading with him to let someone named Izija see 15 bars of copper and choose the best to give to a customer, Idin-Sin. He also asked Ea-nāṣir’s to “Act in such a way that Idin-Sin will not become angry” (Killgrove, 2018).

The original tablet, the one of Nanni, was found in 1953 by Sir Leonard Woolley during a 1922-34 expedition to Ur, and the tablet is normally on display at the British Museum (British Museum, 2026). However, further tablets were later found addressed to our favourite merchant with more complaints such as the ones mentioned above (Killgrove, 2018; Leemans, 1960).

The tablets are evidence that, no matter what point in time you live in, customers will still make complaints and will go to great lengths to ensure you know they are dissatisfied. The stories and escapades of Ea-nāṣir are widely seen as the oldest evidence of customer complaints, and are a fascinating insight to the everyday lives and workings from over 3,000 years ago.

Berengar Needham is currently a student on the MSc Museum Studies programme at the University of Leicester.

References

• British Museum. (2026). Tablet. British Museum. Available at: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_1953-0411-71

• Deron, B. (2018). This 3,800-Year-Old Tablet Contains The World’s First Customer Service Complaint. All That’s Interesting. Available at: https://allthatsinteresting.com/first-customer-service-complaint-ea-nasir

• Killgrove, K. (2018). Meet The Worst Businessman Of The 18th Century BC. Forbes. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2018/05/11/meet-the-worst-businessman-of-the-18th-century/#c1875012d5de

• Konstantopoulos, G. (2021). "Gods in the Margins: Religion, Kingship, and the Fictionalized Frontier". In Konstantopoulos, Gina; Zaia, Shana (eds.). As Above, So Below. Penn State University Press. pp. 3–27. doi:10.1515/9781646021536-003.

• Leemans, W. F. (1960). "Ur: Time of Rim-Sin". Foreign Trade in the Old Babylonian Period as Revealed by Texts from Southern Mesopotamia. Studia et Documenta ad Iura Orientis Antiqui Pertinentia. Vol. 6. Leiden: Brill. pp. 36–55. LCCN a61001806