The Full Story of Ea-Nasir's Copper

These are the oldest stories, online at oldeststories.net. For thousands of years after the fall of the Mesopotamian empires, the most famous Mesopotamian would have been a Biblical figure like Nebuchadnezzar or the mythical Semiramis. After archaeologists began to unearth records of Sumer, Babylon, a cat and other Near-Eastern civilizations, figures like Gilgamesh and Hammarabi became more famous. Today, however, I think more people know the name and story of A. N. Seer, the untrustworthy copper merchant than anyone else from the first civilization. This is because he has in the last ten or so years become something of a meme for his shady business dealings in the ancient city of Irr. I remain uncertain as to why exactly he's become a meme, but whether this is your first time hearing about A. N. Seer or if you've been trading memes about him for a decade, I can promise you that the A. N. Seer rabbit hole is deeper than you realize. And yes, I was going to talk about Unix deportations and elite education today, but as a new father I'm behind schedule, so we get an old Babylonian meme episode instead. Unix will be next time. Today is the day that I admit that I've been sleeping on A. N. Seer. No joke, I've seen the memes about copper fraud and even read the original tablet where the complaint is made. I heard the explanations that he's wrapping rocks in copper and just sort of nodded along. That is a known historical scam, and I heard that he had a pattern of copper fraud in his history. Now, that last bit should have triggered an alarm bell in my head because as fun as the A. N. Seer memes are, I'd always sort of implicitly assumed that like basically all of our economic texts from ancient history, A. N. Seer was known only from a single document and there was nothing else to it. But oh boy, I can tell you now, there's more to it. Before we get too deep, some of you have no idea what I'm on about and some of you think you know where this is going but are surely mistaken and so it's best to begin at the beginning. Our story is sent in the decades between 1800 and 1750 BCE. These are momentous years, the waning decades of what historians call the Isan Larsa period. And yes, you can read all about this era in my book, History and Myth from Babylon and the Amorites. It's a great little book available on Amazon right now, but the short version is that civilization is quite old at this point. The oldest cities in the region, cities like Eridoo, Eruk and Er, are all many thousands of years old at this point with the weight of history on their shoulders. The Sumerians who built these cities have faded away to be replaced by Acadians who are in turn currently in danger of being replaced by Amorites. Down in the southern part of Mesopotamia where Sumer, Akad and Babylon are, pretty much all of the cities have Amorite kings and mixed Acadian Amorite populations. Our boy Aeneasir is an Acadian, or at least his name is. The key fact of the Isan Larsa period is that this is a period of conflict between city states at the same time that a major demographic change is occurring. By the time of Aeneasir, the key cities in the south are trying to conquer the whole region, and these are Isan, Larsa, Babylon and Malgium, and at the moment things are fairly even between these powers. It's quite a dynamic situation, strongly influenced by outside powers like the Yamaha dynasty of Aleppo and the Elamites of southern Iran and the North Mesopotamian Empire of Shamsia Dad. And through it all, the world's first international trade network is flowing strongly, really enabling all of civilization. Now, no one person ever really traveled the whole length of the great trade network. The network's various tendrils reach all the way out to northern Europe and the west, and all the way to Thailand and Central Asia in the east, moving all manner of luxury goods and daily necessities and most importantly metals from place to place. And that last bit, the metals, that's key here. Mesopotamia is the birthplace of the Bronze Age, fusing copper and tin to make a metal so useful, it came to define the technological landscape of a 2000 year long era. And yet Mesopotamia itself has no copper, not even a little bit. Every shekel and every scrap had to be imported or plundered from the people of the nearby mountains. And the truth is that the majority of it was purchased through copper merchants, just like our boy, a Nessir. The tin situation is even worse, not only is it completely absent from Mesopotamia, they didn't have any in the nearby mountains. And the closest three sources of tin are Afghanistan, Thailand, and Spain. And while people think most of the tin came from Afghanistan, there is still debate about whether tin was sourced from these other two places or from some even more distant and exotic locales. Mesopotamia was able to do this because the first Mesopotamian civilization, the Sumerians and the Pre-Sumerian Ubiens, were founded to a unique degree on trade. The region where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers hit the Persian Gulf is sort of a unique geographical area. There are three distinct biomes here. You have riverland, suitable for irrigation and agriculture. You have steplands, suitable for pasture. And there's marshlands, which are good for fishing. And the borders between these biomes are quite sharply delineated and all very close to each other. So when the city of Eradou was founded, probably the first great city of the region, there were distinct sections of the city for farmers, herdsmen, and fisherfolk, each making their living trading with each other for access to the goods only produced by the other two groups. This trading quickly expanded outwards towards Egypt and Anatolia and then to India and Central Asia, and increasingly the Mesopotamians went out and founded trade colonies along these same roots. This is actually the origin of the city of Asher, which would later be home to the Assyrian Empire. Now, this international trade network was already well in place by about 4000 BCE, though of course it's still relatively low volume and underdeveloped in a lot of ways. It was in service to the trade companies, the governance and agreements that arose from them that writing was invented. The oldest writing in the world was used to tally accounts, then to mark who owns what, and then to detail contractual obligations and only later to record religious hymns and great literature and national histories. We usually say that writing was invented in Sumer around 3000 BCE, but of course it was a process that took centuries. Thus an Assyria, a man who is trading and whose memory survives via written account tally's and contractual negotiations, is a man who fundamentally represents civilization in its most primal form. He himself was just one of many such men, but he's remembered because in the 1920s and 1930s an archaeologist named Sir Leonard Woolly, who was a veritable gigatchad, dug up his house while excavating the city of Err, and in Assyria's house was a collection of letters in a box, much like how I have somewhat random assortment of documents in a folder in my desk at home. And this is an important way of thinking about what we have for Assyria. The collection that we call the archive of Assyria is not like some carefully curated library, but neither is it a purely random assortment of texts either. There's about 26 readable documents, all of which are letters or receipts that were relevant enough for Assyria to hold on to and put them in a box. I know what I think about what if one drawer out of my desk were to be preserved for archaeologists, just with whatever is in there right now. Think of maybe your own drawers, your own cabinets or whatever. There is a story that can be pieced together from just my receipts in a box. But that's not every single document in my life, of course. Not every document in my drawer is even about me, but there's a story there. And this is the kind of story that we're left with for Assyria. And because of this, we don't know when Assyria was born or when he died or how old he was in any of the documents. We don't know where he hails from originally, nor who his family is. His name, A. and Assyria, means A. God of Wisdom, Magic, and Water, is my protector or guardian. That element, Assyria, is related in its roots to the modern Arabic name, NASA, which in Arabic takes the same root letters with slightly different vowels and has come to me in more like helper or giver of victory, which is, I think you can tell a similar, though not identical, idea from a related language separated a few thousand years apart. Now his father is apparently named Sin Mgeer. And this man is harder to track down because it's not an uncommon name. We know of a Sin Mgeer who worked for Shamash Hazir, an administrator who sometimes wrote letters back and forth to the great Hamarabi of Babylon. And there's another Sin Mgeer in Larsa, who is frequently complained about by a fellow named Sin Idanam, who in one case is demanding that Sin Mgeer pay back a significant loan. Another where he's demanding that Sin Mgeer return some animal groomsmen that had been assigned to him. And other ones where Sin Mgeer is being summoned at least once under guard for reasons that are unclear. Well, it would be exciting to think that history's most famous scammer was, in fact, the son of an heirduelle. The truth is that the dates don't line up super well with any of the Sin Mgeers that we know of in the textual record. And in fact, the delinquent Sin Mgeer is apparently the son of someone else and active a few decades later than an Asir, and so probably unrelated. Still, it's fun to think that it's not actually all that difficult to start looking through letters and end up finding ancient people complaining about other ancient people. It was its own whole genre of how they communicated with each other. Back to Anasir though, the earliest document with a date on it that we have from him is dated to the year 1809 BCE, and it's a big old receipt. It's somewhat long but quite repetitive, and the part we're interested in reads, "For Bur Sin, one Pishanam to Ahishagish, one Pishanam to Nabi Ilashu, one Pishanam to Anasir, one Pishanam to Namrasharur," and it goes on and on like that. It's clearly a receipt, a Pishanam is some sort of container fairly standardized in size, sort of like a wicker basket or wooden chest, and Bur Sin is in charge of distributing one each to a variety of people. In this same receipt we have a few different people, each in charge of distributing items to an assortment of people under them, and so it would seem that Anasir is here receiving a distribution of goods, possibly grain or possibly some other sort of consumable or durable good, as a sort of daily or possibly weekly ration in exchange for some work he performed for Bur Sin. But that Bur Sin is only the distributor here, someone ranked in the middle of the organization, but not the ultimate boss, suggesting that this distribution was some sort of a large company, giving pay to a long list of workers. Even in these sorts of economic receipts, which are really a little different from pay stubs or grocery receipts you might get today, we can tell a bit of a story because we have another of these Pishanem lists dated significantly later, at least 18 years later, if not more, though the exact dating formula used is a bit obscure. But in that later receipt, Anasir is listed not as the receiver of rations, but as the distributor. Suggesting that in 20 years, he climbed the rank in this particular organization. Not the most exceptional story, a lower worker becoming middle management after two decades, but it's a story nonetheless and exceptional just for the fact that we can put it together at all. But going back to his earlier texts, we have one from 1807, only two years after that first text when he's still presumably fairly junior in the organization he's working with. And this one is not just him receiving payment. The text reads, "One Iku of moderate value field, an Iku being about 3600 square meters. Next to the orchard of Sin Pilah, next to the orchard of Sin Ma'ilu, next to the orchard of Alepii'ilu, near the street of the brothers Abhimatim and Usi alas." Anasir has purchased this plot for two and a half shekels of silver, full payment in silver weight at the time of purchase in the presence of multiple witnesses, signed, sealed, delivered and dated. This is not a small land rental, but neither is it huge, it's the sort of thing that someone of modest means might use to really start making income for himself, or possibly an income supplement if he's already somewhat wealthy. We know this would not be the only property that Anasir took possession of, as he would buy a decent-sized house in another part of town some 20 years later. But all this tells us that our copper merchant was never in his life one of the high elite of society, but at the same time he had the gumption to make something of himself and likely provided fairly well for his family. Now outside of the Anasir archive, there are at least two other surviving texts from other cities, the cities of Sappar and Larson, which mention Anasir as a respected and known man of prominence. In each of these texts we hear about various legal drama. In one case there was a confusion about various labor assignments from the local lord, a lady who was assigned to the gate of Ishtar and two plough teams to work a certain estate, and at least one other unreadable personnel assignment. In this case we hear that the lord is asked to send a letter of clarification to Anapishti, Anasir and one other man, indicating perhaps that they are expected to render some sort of decision based on the letter and circumstances. In other text we hear about Sili Shamash complaining about his mother-in-law. Apparently when Sili Shamash married his wife, his mother-in-law insisted that they take on a few slaves from the wife's family into their new house, and these slaves are apparently all speaking ill of Sili Shamash and humiliating him publicly. Sadly we don't hear all the juicy details here, but we do hear that he had previously sued his mother-in-law about this very matter, and in that lawsuit, which was held with Anasir specifically named among the elders of the town presiding, the mother-in-law had denied all the claims. However, this time Sili Shamash has brought a large number of witnesses and says he will establish his claims properly. Now, as interesting as all this 4,000 year old juicy gossip is, none of it's about Anasir specifically, but they do establish that he was sufficiently well respected, probably in the later parts of his career, that he was called as a witness and lay judge for trials and disputes of various sorts. And this is how these sorts of legal battles would go in ancient Mesopotamia. There would be a king or a representative of the king when needed, but also presiding and helping to preside, and sometimes acting in the place of the judge, would be various elders of the town. These are men of repute and noted in the town, usually older and well established men, and for Anasir to have risen to this level tells us that the overall arc of his career is generally a positive one. And this is important to keep in mind, we have complaints about him, and we will be getting to those soon enough, but we don't know how many complaints he received over the course of his life, and we can't really know how legitimate all the complaints were. I think in the internet memes, we all assume implicitly that the accuser is right and Anasir is just straight up defrauding him. But in fact, we know it was sometimes the case that people were falsely accused. When this was discovered, it could go quite poorly for the false accuser, often they would be subject to some multiple of the penalty that would have been laid upon their victim. But ancient justice was not blind, and we know that many false accusations just went unpunished because their accuser had the right connections, leveraging them to wage law fair for their own advantage. It sure is a good thing that over the last 4,000 years we have managed to eliminate that sort of ugliness from our own legal system, and no one would ever wage any sort of law fair to hurt anybody at all. Anyway, we can't trace the fullness of Anasir's career, but we can trace at least some of it through the receipts, and we can look at the larger context of his merchant activities in relation to the economy of the time. You see, Anasir would, at some point in his life, become associated with the Alec Dalmun. Now, we don't have a super clear idea of who these guys were. They seem like some sort of guild or association of traitors. They're not quite a corporation, but they seem to have had been a clearinghouse for merchants and investors and tradesmen and purchasers to all come together for long-distance merchant expeditions. Now, I've wanted to do a whole episode about seafaring in ancient Mesopotamia for a very long time, but the sources so far have been too thin and scattered, even though the Fisher folk of the marshes were in pretty much all time periods, a hefty chunk of the population, and shipping out of the Persian Gulf was, in the early days, an important and prestigious route. But we know that the pre-literate and early dynastic Sumerians were traveling by ship directly to modern-day Oman, Sudan, and the Indus Valley. This trade was hugely important in ways that are hard to summarize here, but not only was it economically profitable, it's the reason why basically the entire world, except for some parts of East Asia today, used writing systems descended directly from Sumerian-cuniform writing. But that's its own story. Anyway, this all peaked with the Acadian Empire, though maritime trade was of course never the focus of the Acadian Empire, and it very briefly revived again during the Sumerian Renaissance of the Earth III Dynasty, a couple centuries before Anisear's time. Note here that Anisear and the Alec Talmun are based out of Er, which is going to be the last great seaport of Mesopotamia. Anyway, with the fall of Sumer to the Emirates in the year 2000 BCE, the parallel collapse of the Indus Valley civilization at the same time, and with Egypt having long since fallen into its first intermediate period, the three great civilizations of the early Bronze Age Indian Ocean go quiet, leading to an almost total collapse of trade in the region. It'd actually be up to the Assyrians, more commonly thought of as great warriors, to basically invent the idea of being an independent merchant kingdom around 1900 BCE. You see, the sea trades of the early Bronze Age appeared to have been dominated from the Mesopotamian perspective by the only people who had money to finance them, who which were the temples and the palaces, the great governing institutions funded these expeditions. The city of Assyria, however, had, by the early 1900s, seemingly out of nowhere, invented all sorts of advanced debt instruments and joint stock companies, and the sort of contracting techniques that most history books actually credit the Dutch for having invented in the early modern period. Around the time of A and A seer, perhaps a few decades earlier, though probably not much earlier than the 1850s, the Alec Till Mun appear and start using these Assyrian techniques to pool monies, not from great institutions, but from private citizens of means, in order to finance ventures down the Euphrates and out into the Persian Gulf. And this is the context in which A and A seer is operating, being one of these traveling merchants either assisting with or perhaps eventually leading these expeditions. By the way, there is an interesting note here that Dillman, which is in modern times the Isle of Bahrain, itself has an interesting history. Having previously been little more than a stopping point for ships thanks to its good springs and natural harbours, but otherwise total lack of resources, it was taken over by the Acadian Empire when they were just looking for more places to conquer, and after the fall of a CAD it became independent. Bahrain made its living by connecting merchants from distant regions with the Mesopotamians. Basically, what the Sumerian cities had been doing, but couldn't do as effectively because they were busy with all their civilization's collapsing thing. But both Bahrain's little enterprise and the entire Persian Gulf Indian Ocean trade route would decline and collapse over the subsequent centuries for a variety of reasons. To the point that when Alexander the Great wants to travel from the Indus River back to Babylon, which is a route that 2000 years prior had been a well-traveled merchant route, by the time of Alexander this same merchant route is going to be so long forgotten that it's going to be considered by everyone, native and Greek alike, to be a voyage of discovery, and the region will be just in utter desolation. Which is interesting to think about that this, it's lost civilization stuff, it's great, but it's all beside the point. The point is that A and A seer is often accused of shady business practices. But if we read his letters in full, I think there's a hint at least that he might not have been quite so shady. He might have been desperate. It all begins with the opportunity of a lifetime. Someone comes to his organization with a request for an absolutely massive shipment. We don't hear who it is, but most people assume that it's the palace of Rimsin of Larsa, either gearing up for his great war against the hated rival city of Isin, or he's spending the plunder from the sack after Rimsin's victory, since it's really hard to think of who else might need and be able to buy that much copper in one go. In the expedition return, we have this somewhat contested receipt that reads, "Alasim received from Dillman 13,750 meanas of copper measured in the Dillman white system. Thereupon we, the recipients, were given 5,532 and two thirds mean of copper according to the Dillman white. Its weight, according to the weight of Er, is a total of 611 talents and 6.5 meanas." And now that's about 18 metric tons of copper in modern terms, 7 to 10 full size SUVs in freedom units. From this, 245 talents and 54.5 meanas of copper were given to us from Alasim. 4,271 and a half meanas are expected from ANSEer, and 325 meanas are expected from Nauirum Ili, which will be received later. In total, we have so far received 450 talents and 2 and a third meanas of copper. The remainder we are waiting to receive is 161 talents and 4 and a third meanas. Now, I should state at the outset that the exact reading of this text is disputed. ANSEer is said to have had a "habiltum" which usually means a "debt", but the wording of this text doesn't make a standard "debt" seem appropriate. I think the above translation, which does take a few liberties with the grammar, fits the best. Essentially, we're hearing that an absolutely massive shipment from multiple merchants was ordered and promised, and that Alasim appears to have arrived in port first, then handed over his portion of the shipment, then gotten the receipts that we just read. They were then expecting for ANSEer and Nauirum Ili to arrive in subsequent boats, because you just probably can't transport 18 tons of copper in a single vessel of the fairly modest size that they would typically be using in ancient Mesopotamia. And then there's an additional portion that remains still to be transported. Probably they are assuming that one or more of the boats are going to return after dropping their stuff off in Ur to pick the remaining amount back up in Dilman. Now by itself, that's only unusual for the size of the transaction. By every other standard, it seems to be an excellent example of the sorts of exchanges that brought copper into Mesopotamia during this period. But here's a theory. What if ANSEer is actually just overwhelmed with this delivery? It could be that he's unable to deliver in a timely way. Perhaps his boat takes a while to return. Perhaps he's actually short the amount that he thought he was getting. He is converting from a strange measurement system, and even though the math is well understood, it could still be like that story of that Mars robot that missed the entire planet of Mars because of some error converting like feet to meters somewhere. math is, after all, hard, and it was hard 4,000 years ago. If we assume that ANSEer was somehow disrupted by this massive order, or if he was just encountering some other sort of disruption to his business. And then if we sequence his letters as follows, it paints a picture of a man reaching out with increasing desperation to keep his affairs in order. And I should stress that most of these letters are undated, and so there's no real way to know what the correct order is, or even how much time passed between each. So I think there's alternate ways to reconstruct this. I'm just putting out what I think makes sense, and I think we get a similar reading from at least some of the other possible arrangements of these letters. We begin then with ANSEer being put in a position of needing to please someone, possibly a superior and possibly an investor. Mahadam says to ANSEer, concerning the ingots, the sealed document from your business partners has just gone out to you. The check is, so to speak, in the mail. Now, Asanikum and Ubiatum have just set out to you. If you are truly my brother, send someone with them and let him give them the ingots available to you. And now, Mahadam is not truly ANSEer's brother. This is the sort of friendly language that business associates and even diplomatic correspondents often assumes in this age. But the point is that Mahadam wants to have ANSEer pay these two guys on behalf of the wider business organization. And just wants ANSEer to trust that Mahadam and the other two men are all on the up and up and are only going to take what they're owed. You know, sometimes this really does happen, and in fact, most of the time that is probably what happened, but sometimes it doesn't. We don't really have an outcome from the end of this one. So we do have a somewhat similar letter involving different people. And keep in mind, as we read through these, that these are all letters that ANSEer considered worth holding on to in a box. So none of these are just throwaway documents, despite what we might want to think. But they're also not his core life texts, like his marriage contract, his house purchase contract, things like that. Speak to ANSEer and one or two other people whose names are damaged in the original text. Thus says Naraam something unreadable, "May the God shamash keep y'all well. About what you wrote to me, I've sent Imgil Sin to you for the copper from my purse and from Arabam Sin's purse. So put that copper under seal for him and let him bring it to me. Give him very good copper. Hopefully the copper that's in your care has not gone out, lest I should grow angry. Moreover, if it's missing, you must replenish the missing copper. If you are truly my sons, then the document breaks off. But we assume he said something like, if you're truly interested in maintaining our personal and business relationship, then you will make sure that the messenger I'm sending gets the copper I am owed. Now why would Naraam something something be worried about ANSEer's copper? Which he owes to Naraam something something? And why would he be worried that it might have already gone out? Is it because ANSEer has been making up shortfalls to one customer by shorting other customers? And why the insistence on good quality? This actually might be explained not by anything to do with ANSEer himself. But it's something of a trope in ancient text. We even have kings of Babylon whining to kings of Egypt that they had hoped for higher quality gold bars for their birthday presents. So there seems to have been something of a culture just for asking for higher quality goods in general. You could call it haggling or you could call it being obnoxious, but the text themselves are just too distant from the lived reality to let us know the true spirit of these requests. Still, in ANSEer's case though, he does seem to have a habit of handing off lower quality copper when the client is demanding top quality copper, something we're going to see again and again. For example, here's another letter, "Ilishu Talasu" says to ANSEer, "Isiah will come to you for hidden sins copper." Now on the face of it, this setup looks just like the last letter. The instructions continue to send him 15 ingots and let Isiah select 6 of the best ingots and give those to him. Note in such a way that hidden sin does not get upset. The letter then moves on to another topic, someone else that ANSEer is supposed to give some copper to, but that's difficult to read from there. But in any case, this is an interesting letter because it gives us an idea of how quality selection was supposed to work or possibly what customers might demand from merchants whose reputation has been slipping. And this more or less is where we get to the famous complaint tablet of ANSEer. It reads, "Nani says to ANSEer, "When you left for Dillman, you promised me this in your own words that you would give good ingots to him, Gil Sin. And then you left, but you didn't do what you promised. You allocated bad ingots to my messenger. And then you said quote, "If you all want to take it, take it. If you all don't want to take it, then go away." Now, who do you think I am that you have despised me like this? I commanded your representatives to receive my capital, but you despised me and not once, but twice, have sent back empty handed from foreign territory. On the Alec Tellman, who has treated me like this, you despised my messenger. You're talking nonsense about all the silver you made me spend, and moreover, it was on your behalf that I gave 18 talents, a quite significant amount, of copper to the palace. And also, Shumya Boom gave another 18 talents on your behalf. Beside that copper, which you owe me, but which we have a contract sealed in the Shamash temple for, all over this copper here, how did you treat me? You held back my capital in foreign territory. You owe it to me to restore my capital in full, and you will learn that I will not accept copper of bad quality from you. That is the end of the letter, but remember that clay tablets are not like pieces of paper. They are three dimensional, and thus it's possible to write little postscripts or notes along the edges of the tablet as well as the front and back. And so, in this we have little side notes. On the right it says, "In my courtyard, I will select the copper ingots individually and take possession of them." And on the left side it says, "Also, because you have despised me, I will make you miserable." And yes, what an enjoyable letter. It's quite wonderful that a letter this fantastic has become a meme in modern days. This is a man who is clearly unhappy, both with Aeneasier's evasiveness, but also the reported attitude problem he seems to have. The idea of the seller puts out his goods, and the buyer selects the one he wants, it's basically how grocery stores have always worked for us. All the apples are out on the table and you pick the apples you want. But this really does seem to be sort of a new, you have to ask for it kind of thing in 1800 BCE. Usually the seller would just give you whatever the seller felt like giving you. And the complaints about despising Nani's messenger. These are deeply personal complaints. This is a cultural thing about this period. Messengers were often considered as extensions of the person sending the messenger. So when the messenger of a king went to a foreign country, there would be a certain amount of bowing expected towards the messenger as an extension of the king. You know, the people wouldn't be confused as to who was king and who was messenger, but there was a certain amount of social role adoption by the messenger. And so rudeness to a messenger was seen more directly than in our own culture as rudeness to the sender. Now one myth that's arisen around this letter in modern times is the details of Anisear's failure, or perhaps Anisear's scam. You'll often see it said that the reason Nani is mad here is because Anisear sold him basically rocks wrapped in a thin layer of copper in ingot shape. Now to modern ears, this sounds like a wily coyote sort of scam, something too silly to be real. But in fact, it is a known scam that happened back in ancient times. And indeed, sometimes you'll still hear about like nicer steel being laid over cheaper iron from disreputable suppliers today. But looking at the wider context of Anisear's letters, it seems pretty clear that at the very least, he's not guilty of this particular scam. Most of his letters see complaints about him simply not delivering, or not delivering on time, giving customers the run around and playing loose with who gets what deliveries. When there are concerns about quality, we don't see language that the customer has been scammed, just that the quality of the copper is less than what they wanted. You see, the Samarians and Acadians were expert workers of copper and bronze, and while the merchants involved are not themselves metallurgists, they do know how to identify better and worse copper from its color and texture and weight in things. At the same time, they do have limits to how much they can control the quality of the copper as it goes from raw ores into transportable ingots. And so anybody selling copper ingots is going to have just necessarily a heterogeneous mix of copper qualities in their stock. Obviously, anyone buying copper is going to want the best quality for the same price, and so standard practice was simply to negotiate higher or lower prices for higher or lower quality. At the same time, it was common to hear sellers complain about buyers who negotiated for the lower price while taking the higher quality, or indeed, tax men would often take the highest quality bars during tax collection and then record them as low quality bars. You hear people complain about that a lot. And the same sort of thing would happen with sheep, with fruits, with slaves, all kinds of very common commodities and property. With A&SEER, I get the strong impression that he's experiencing a deficiency of quality copper more than anything else. Perhaps he cheaped out over in Bahrain and hoped no one would notice, or perhaps his supplier didn't give him the quality expected, and maybe A&SEER failed to properly check what he was receiving. Either way, he seems short of the quality copper that his customers are expecting. Or also that Nani's order, like many others, was probably placed before he had even left the city of Er for the island of Dilmun. So even if the shipment arrived with less quality copper than expected, then the palace might have taken a huge amount of the best copper right off the top. Then all of A&SEER's various customers are sort of left fighting with him and sometimes a little bit with each other to get what is left of the good stuff, hence the need for A&SEER to very stressfully give them all the runaround. Now with that context, we can read in the next letter, "Speak to A&SEER," that says "Apaya," the partner we already saw in that 18-ton delivery, "Give my own copper of good quality to nighanana so that I will not become upset." Moreover, Nana Tulasu has ordered me to give copper worth two mena of silver. You and I, didn't we already meet and talk about this? From my copper, give me copper worth one mena of silver, and I will weigh the silver in your presence. Also send me 815-liter copper kettle and 10 mena of copper, and I will also weigh the silver to pay for that. Now we hear about nighanana in other letters actually, and he's been getting the runaround from A&SEER for quite some time. Ultimately, it seems that A&SEER's business partner resolves the matter out of his own stock pile, and then as charity for his partner offers to buy some of A&SEER's stock. Presumably, the lower quality stuff, despite the fact that apaya appears to have a larger amount of copper and greater amount of wealth than A&SEER does, meaning this is something like a pity purchase to help keep A&SEER afloat. One of those other letters with nighanana reflects the whole situation well again. Speak to A&SEER, thus says RB Turam, another seeming business partner. Am I thus considered lightly among your brothers? You gave copper to your investors, but are unwilling to give any to me? I entrusted Ibi Enlil with a friendly loan, so give silver and its profits over to nighanana to resolve that debt. I've let you make out a sealed tablet for me concerning copper, so why did you not give me the copper? If you will not give me the copper, I will enter your debts into my record, and give me very good copper, and send me your man for the delivery. For all his complaining, though, it doesn't seem that RB Turam received satisfaction as we have another letter from him on a similar topic. RB Turam says to A&SEER, "Why have you not given the copper to nighanana?" Poor nighanana, we never found out if he actually gets his copper. In addition, Ili Idnam has reached the end of his five-year agreement, and he came to me and said that the copper which nighanana is owed is actually belonging to Ili Idnam. So it would seem that nighanana ordered copper, then got into debt based on copper that he had not yet received. So Ili Idnam, nighanana's creditor, can't get paid until nighanana gets paid, and we all know by now that A&SEER sure ain't paying up. RB Turam continues, "Whatever copper you do owe me, do us all a favor, and just give it to nighanana instead." But listen, is what you're doing a good thing A&SEER of the copper that he paid, and then the rest of the letter is fragmentary, but it does seem to indicate that RB Turam worked really hard to get that copper deal put through, and A&SEER is the one that seems to have fallen short here, so he concludes with an emphatic demand to give the copper over to nighanana. But now we see that A&SEER's recalcitrance is becoming a hindrance to the entire economy of Ur. We get a letter from Ili Idnam, the guy who had loaned money to nighanana, speak to A&SEER. A&SEER says Ili Idnam, "These things you are doing, do you think they are good? It's been an unreadable number of years since I gave you silver, probably as an investment in a copper expedition to Dilman. But with hostile intent, you are offering me low quality copper. But if you see fit, you can keep your copper, and it's dead give me back my silver with interest." Now a sizable chunk is broken from the letter, but the end of the letter seems to complain again that A&SEER has not only been unwilling to pay, but is growing increasingly hostile as his attempts to fob off his creditors become ever more desperate. But this is where we have to leave our story, because this is the end of our letter box. We don't know ultimately how A&SEER managed to wriggle his right way out of this jam. The fact that we have indicators that he was, at some point, considered among the respected elders of his town, suggested everything worked out for him in the end. We have to remember that we have only one box of business receipts from which to judge his entire life. We know he would have had contracts for his main house, for his marriage, for his slaves, his contracts, his loans, possibly other business enterprises. These stories would have told us about his home life, and possibly about the exchanges that relieved his difficulties. This particular box seems dedicated to his activities among the Alektele Mun company, particularly around his hardest times there. That's the character of the story that we end up with, and that is the immortal character that we will associate with A&SEER, unless we someday find more from this man. I hope you enjoyed this little expedition, as we looked a little deeper than the memes, as to who A&SEER really was. Next time, though, we're going to actually get to the promised look at the genitals of various government officials in the Neo-Assyrian Empire, and we're going to learn that the education system of Warhammer 40,000 actually has a lot in common with the systems of ancient Assyria. So, join us next time for mass deportations, obscure educational institutions, and the historicity of the Biblical Book of Daniel. Thank you for listening.