The World's Oldest Customer Complaint

In around 1750 BC, in the Sumerian city of Ur, a man named Nanni sat down and had a complaint recorded onto a small clay tablet, just 11.6 centimetres tall and 5 centimetres wide. It was addressed to Ea-nāṣir, a trader who journeyed to the distant land of Dilmun to buy copper before returning to Mesopotamia to sell it. Ea-nāṣir had agreed to sell Nanni copper ingots, but what Nanni wanted and what he got were two very different things.

According to the tablet, Nanni had sent his servant with payment to complete the deal. But when the copper arrived, Nanni judged it to be of sub-standard quality and refused to accept it. Rather than let the matter drop, he had a cuneiform letter inscribed in Akkadian, laying out his grievances in detail: the poor grade of the copper, unresolved issues from an earlier delivery, and — perhaps most personally wounding to Nanni — the rude treatment his servant had received while trying to conduct the transaction on his behalf.

Nanni made a point of noting that although he had already paid for the copper, he still had not accepted it, since it failed to meet his standards. It reads like the ancient equivalent of demanding a refund and a stern talking-to for bad service, preserved not in an email thread but in permanent, fired clay.

Ea-nāṣir was no obscure figure. He belonged to a known group of merchants called the alik Tilmun, or 'Dilmun traders', and appears in other historical texts dated to the 11th and 19th regnal years of Rim-Sîn I, the ruler of Larsa. Other tablets recovered from the ruins believed to be his home suggest Nanni was not alone in his dissatisfaction — a man named Arbituram complained he had never received copper he was owed, and another correspondent wrote that he was simply tired of receiving bad copper from Ea-nāṣir.

The tablet itself was unearthed by Sir Leonard Woolley, who led a joint excavation by the University of Pennsylvania and the British Museum at Ur between 1922 and 1934. It has since been housed primarily at the British Museum, where in 2009 it was stabilised using a conservation treatment called Paraloid B-72 to protect it from further deterioration.