I wonder what the guy would think if he could've known that people would be meme'ing about his poor quality copper in 2024?
Today we think of plated items as being cheap. I believe that would be basically space age technology in ancient Babylon. I don't think they had any electrical or chemical way of plating anything. Not only that, I bet you would need to use very pure copper to plate something.
You're absolutely right, if it was actually plating. However, given the contract was for copper ingots, I'd guess the poor quality copper was copper cast into an ingot shape around something worthless rather than what we would consider plating. It could also have been much more about impurities and ores left over from an incomplete smelting/refining process such that trying to hammer or cast the copper resulted in lots of worthless slag.
Came to post this, of course someone beat me to it.
You could have posted the other one but it's too late for that now! Ha!
I made a joke about Ea-nāṣir when someone mentioned some copper oxidizing their finger.
Nobody laughed.
At least my shame won't last as long as Ea-nāṣir's though
Shame? He had no shame. He treated people with contempt and kept their complains on display, the legend.
Nah, he was just so shitty lately that he had a bunch of them delivered the same day.
Based on my experiences in customer service and just seeing online reviews in general, I have strong doubts about the accuracy of the complaint.
Considering there were other complaints found about not only his copper, but him being rude, I believe he was the asshole here.
I've never met the man, and have done little to no business with him, but in my experience if you do a lot of work some people are going to complain about it, and only the pissiest of them would go out of their way to inscribe a tablet about it. Nobody is putting that effort into "went fine, no complaints."
Ea-nāṣir's reputation may be the earliest victim of survivorship bias.
I, too, hate it when I am sold objectively shitty copper.
You gotta harvest the good stuff inside the walls
Are we sure we're doing Ea-Nasir justice? Perhaps he was a perfectly fine copper salesman but had a weird and totally unhinged customer review (or complaint) he found funny displayed in his home.
Looks like there were more complaint letters in what is assumed to be his dwelling from dudes either not getting their copper or calling it substandard
the scoundrel ea-nasir, such a douche
Everybody seems to know about that guy, but still...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nāṣir
I'd posit: He was a fantastic copper dealer, people far and wide purchased his work and instead of going to a better vendor, the user took time to CUNEIFORM a fucking TABLET in response to a merchandise issue.
To me, it's like assuming ford was an unsuccessful company because someone found a pinto review a few thousand years from now.
