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- [00:00]
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- [01:35]
A
Hello, I hope you're doing well. I'm all good. I'm now back from my swift venture up to Edinburgh. I'm back at my desk and at the time that I'm doing this intro, I've just finished recording this episode and guys, it's amazing. It's all about the world's oldest letters from some 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. We're going to cover loads of different stories, including that of the ancient world's most memed and most derided copper merchant, a man called, er, Natsiya. Now I'm sure a few of you are already getting very, very excited and it is really, really fascinating. Our guest who brings these stories to life is Dr. Amanda Podani, Professor Emeritus of History at California State Polytechnic and another of our fan favorite guests on the show. We had a lot of fun and I really do hope you enjoy let'. 4000 years ago in Mesopotamia, the written word became widespread. For the first time, people began corresponding with each other over great distances, with messages being delivered on hardened clay tablets in an organized manner, the Bronze Age equivalent of a postal service. There Were letters written by kings, kings and nobles, but also by merchants and everyday people, giving us a fascinating insight into life in this Bronze Age world. Letters that varied from people worried about relatives who had moved to the big city of Babylon to angry complaints by customers about the quality of copper they had received. The stories preserved in these Bronze Age tablets are both memorable and relatable. This is the story of the world's oldest letters with our returning guest, Dr. Amanda Podani. Amanda, it is such a pleasure to have you back on the podcast. It has been too long.
- [03:35]
D
It's such a pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
- [03:38]
A
You're more than welcome. And I always love having you on because there's so many amazing stories from ancient Mesopotamia, and this is certainly the case today. I mean, Mesopotamia is home to the oldest letters that we know of.
- [03:49]
D
Yes, that's right, by a long way. I mean. Well, that's not true. There are some early letters from Egypt. We just have thousands of them. So it's a lot. A big corpus of texts to look at. Yes.
- [04:00]
A
How many thousands are we talking about?
- [04:01]
D
Well, for the period that we're going to talk about today, which is from 2000 to 1600 BCE or so, there are about 12,000 in Mesopotamia. Wow. But there are many more if you count the ones that were found in Anatolia that were written by Mesopotamians. So thousands and thousands of them.
- [04:21]
A
And what is so fascinating about these correspondences from that particular time, from that particular half millennium or so, what's really.
- [04:28]
D
Interesting is they'd been writing letters before. They'd had a writing system for 1200 years by at this time, but most of the letters had been very much, at least the ones that had been found very formal, often between kings. You know, there's a sort of sense of that this is just reflecting the world of the very elite people. And around 2,000 or so, literacy becomes more common and people started writing letters who were not their sort of high elites or even if they were elite people. They were writing about things that were sort of day to day concerns that reflected lots of other people's lives. And so we have this just incredible rich perspective of the not quite the common people, but, you know, getting much closer to the common people. And the other thing is that they wrote them in the first person so the person would dictate the letter, but it was all in their own voice. And what I love about them is that whereas many documents from the ancient world are not in the first person, they're not writing. I did such and such and I said to you and that sort of thing. Whereas these are. And you sort of feel as though they're speaking across the centuries directly to us. And also they were not thinking, I'm writing this for posterity. People in 2025 are going to be reading my letters. They were thinking, I just need to get this particular shipment sent and the guy hasn't shown up and I need to go. That was the tone of them. And so they're very immediate and they feel very real, and so they're really, really fun.
- [06:03]
A
Do you think it's also quite reflective of us as a species that quite a few of these letters, including, I'm sure a couple we're going to talk about, is one person complaining about another or moaning about something and writing it down?
- [06:16]
D
Yes. They didn't write unless they had a reason to write, because, of course, it was much more complicated to send a letter than it is to send a text or an email. And so the process was so sort of convoluted, you had to actually physically get the letter to the person. And they didn't have a postal service, so they tended to only write when there was not an emergency, but a real reason that they wanted to get in touch with someone. And those tended to be when they were either complaining about something or they needed to explain something, or they had a request from somebody for, you know, for something or that they were, you know, that had various concerns that they had to express. And sometimes if those concerns were very immediate, you get this sense of, drop everything. Do this now. I need it right away. Because the letter is going to take maybe days or weeks to get there. And so counting in that amount of time for the letter to arrive, you can imagine the urgency on the end of the person who is sending the letter. Like, as soon as you get this, you need to do this, this and this, and get it back to me right away. So, yeah, they do have a rather abrupt tone sometimes. Yes.
- [07:23]
A
This is the Bronze Age equivalent of asap. Before we go into a few examples, Amanda, let's set the scene a bit more. First off, this time period, so 2000 to 1600 BC or BCE, what's happening in Mesopotamia at this time? I've got in my notes the Old Babylonian period.
- [07:41]
D
Yes. Well, it's sort of two periods, because for the first 200 years or so, it was a time when there were a number of small kingdoms and they shared Mesopotamia between them, and they were sometimes allied, they were sometimes at war with one another, but it hadn't sort of unified and Then you get the time. Hammurabi of Babylon, who towards the end of his reign, actually he came to the throne 1792. But in the last 10 or so years of his long reign, 43 year reign, he united most of Mesopotamia, most of what is now Iraq under his rule. And then for the 200 years after that, you sort of see the gradual decline of his, his large kingdom. But with Babylon being the central focus, the time that, the earlier time you have two earlier cities that were more dominant. First the city of Ism and then the city of Larsa and then Babylon took over and then took over both those regions and conquered all of what is now Iraq. So it was a time starts out with quite a bit of warfare, becomes much more peaceful later. But then again you see wars break out as, as happened, but they weren't constant and they weren't affecting everyone all the time. For the most part when you look at these letters, people aren't too much worried about war coming and destroying their city. It's the wars were localized and not ubiquitous all the time.
- [09:03]
A
Our first ever interview together was some three years ago now about this time of year, wasn't it? It was all about Hammurabi.
- [09:10]
D
Yes.
- [09:10]
A
So really nice that we can get back to this time period for our chat today. So Babylon's big at this time. Are there still other cities that are really big? Are the, the so called, like the Sumerian cities on the plain of Sumer, are they also still big at this time?
- [09:23]
D
This is actually the same region. So what had been Sumer in the earlier period is now this region that is southern Babylonia. It has different names at different times, but it's, it's the same place. And those cities that were important in Sumerian times continued to be important like the city of Ur and the city of Uruk, the city of Lagash. These were cities that continued to be important throughout this time period. Even from the third millennium BCE they had been important.
- [09:50]
A
And so if literature becomes more, well, not literature, if language, the written language becomes more widespread at this time in this area of the world, the big questions what language are we talking about and how do they write it down?
- [10:04]
D
Well, by this time Sumerian was a dead language. That was the original language that the writing system seems to have developed for. They still wrote it, but they don't seem to have spoken it at home. The language that was spoken was Akkadian, which is a Semitic language. It's related to Hebrew and Arabic today. It's very well known, very well understood and they used the cuneiform writing system to write Akkadian. And especially in the letters. You see that the letters from this time period are almost all in Akkadian, and they're so, again, they're in the language that they were speaking at home. Contracts might still be in Sumerian literature might still be in Sumerian, but when you're writing a letter, it's in Akkadian.
- [10:43]
A
Because everyone can understand that. And so a letter can go far and wide and people will still be able to understand what's written on it.
- [10:48]
D
Right, within. Within the Mesopotamian basin. Yes. That was the main. Main language that was spoken. The other thing is they were writing on clay. Some people have the misapprehension that they wrote on stone. It wasn't stone, it was clay. And these tablets are. That they wrote on are surprisingly small. So letters. The smallest letter I've seen is about the size of a postage stamp, and they've got tiny, tiny writing on it. The biggest one's about the size of an iPhone. So they're not big, they're quite small.
- [11:13]
A
So the size of a postage stamp. So I'm just getting my mind around that right now. So that's centimeters.
- [11:19]
D
Yes. And they would write in tiny, tiny script on it. So. But the average size, really, it's the size of what you can put in the palm of your hand, which, of course, now is a. Is a phone for us, but for them. And there are some funny pictures, actually, where you've got a scribe holding a tablet and it looks as though he's holding a phone because of the way.
- [11:36]
A
We think the mobile phones are the Bronze Age. Well, there you go. Okay, well, let's focus on a few examples. We have to start with the man, the one, the man, the myth, the legend of today. I'm going to butcher the pronunciation, but please, I hope you get it right. Is it Ea Nazir?
- [11:55]
D
Is that how we say it's Ea? And the second half of his name is Natsir. It's got a ts sound to it because the S has a dot under it, and that makes it Natsir.
- [12:04]
A
Eha. Natsir.
- [12:06]
D
Ehr.
- [12:06]
A
Natsir. Okay, so who is this legend, Amanda, Why do we know of this figure? Why is he so Internet famous today?
- [12:16]
D
Okay, well, let me tell you who he was first. He was a man who lived in Ur, which was a city right in the southern part of Mesopotamia. His house was excavated by Leonard Woolley. And so when. This was ages ago, a century ago, when he was excavating the house he found on the on the floor of the house, a number of tablets that were scattered around. I think 26 of them. And these then were excavated, and then they were. They were published, and they were sort of not particularly. Nobody paid much attention to them. There were other houses with other tablets, but this particular house that belonged to Eha Natsir. What was striking about him was that he was a trader, a sea trader. He went. He had boats that traveled all the way through the Gulf to what is now Bahrain to Dilman, and he was particularly involved in the copper trade. So he's been known about for a very long time. In fact, I first encountered him when I was writing my book, Brotherhood of Kings, that we've talked about on your podcast before. Because I was looking for someone that I could focus on who did see trade and who was involved in this trade with Dillman. And it was. He was a lovely person. I've had sort of, I don't know, maybe five pages in my book about him because he had all of these things that. My book was about international relations and trade and diplomacy. And he was fascinating because he had this connection with Dillman. Now, this was before he was Internet famous. I was ahead of the curve.
- [13:46]
A
You beat the trend.
- [13:47]
D
You beat the trend. I did, I did. But I did mention at the time that one of the striking things about these letters is that one of them was from someone who seemed to be a very disgruntled customer who was upset about the quality of the cupboard that he received. So, anyway, a couple of years went by, actually, five years went by after I published that book, and I started getting texts from friends and links to, at that point, Twitter saying, have you seen this trader? You know, this guy who's going viral? And I looked at him like, yeah, my guy, right. But what had happened was, I think that the tablet was on display in the British Museum. I have no idea who, you know, how this started, but somebody saw the tablet and presumably found the translation, which is easily available. It's a 1967 book, had published this tablet. And it got to be this thing about the first customer complaint, the first really angry customer. And when you read the letter, it does sound like someone just really annoyed when they're trying to get good quality in the product that they're buying and they've been given bad copper, and it is still everywhere. I was talking to my husband about it yesterday, and he went online to look up, who is this? A Nazir. And. And you just find T shirts and mugs and, you know, I mean, he is everywhere. So I think he would be absolutely flabbergasted to know that of all the people, people remember from his particular century, which is the 19th century BCE, that he was the one that has the biggest name today. It's as if, you know, you or I, 4,000 years from now, suddenly became the most famous person and everybody knew your name. It's very odd. He's been featured in several. There was an article about him in Forbes magazine in 2018, which I think also kind of pushed the interest in him. I love it. I think it's really terrific. Because what's so nice is that he is sort of a typical Mesopotamian person. And one of my goals in what I write is to get people away from only thinking about kings and wars and so forth and looking at real people in real life. So I'm just thrilled that Ao Natsya has this new notoriety I do love.
- [16:02]
A
I've got one guess. It's a meme in front of me at the moment. We'll start off with this one just right now. But it's ancient kings conquering lands and building monuments just to be remembered in history. And then there is Aarnatsia.
- [16:14]
D
Exactly right.
- [16:16]
A
And there's an image of him as well on here. Normally, when there are Aarnazia memes, today, they also show this little figurine of a man with a big beard.
- [16:24]
D
Yes.
- [16:25]
A
What do we know about that is. You're shaking your head when I say that.
- [16:27]
D
Completely unrelated. That sculpture is 900 to 1,000 years older than Ioanatia. Oh, God. So it would be like if you were sort of showing a picture of someone today and you used an image of William the Conqueror. It has nothing to do with him at all. It's completely the wrong era.
- [16:43]
A
Okay, fair enough.
- [16:44]
D
There is no image of Aaronazia, of course, because he was just an average person, and there was no way to get your sculpture done unless you were someone incredibly important. So, I mean, it's as Mesopotamian, but he doesn't wear the clothes Air Nazir would have worn. He doesn't wear. Doesn't look anything like him. So. No.
- [16:59]
A
And can we just explore what exactly this complaint is and who the main figures are in it?
- [17:05]
D
Yes. Okay. This is actually fun because I've been doing some research on him for a project that I'm working on, a new book, and there's going to be an Aeonatsio chapter. So I'm delighted to get to talk about this. So the famous letter is one of only. It's one of 12 letters that were found in his house. But it is the longest and certainly the angriest. And it's written by a man named Nani. And Nani, he doesn't just appear in this letter, he appears in other documents from a Nazi's house. And he was someone who Aaron regularly did business with and who was, I think one of his investors. So he's. It's not where this is presented as an angry customer. He isn't exactly that. He's more an angry investor who seems to feel that he has, you know, he's really helped ao Nazi route. And in here, IO Natsu is not treating him well. He's also apparently the father of three other investors. So there are three other people who are named in a Nazi archive who are described as sons of Nani. So this is a family, and this was true in a lot of trading firms in the. In the ancient near east, that they were often family based. And so we see IO. Natsio also worked with his own father, whose name shows up, and he worked with Nani and Nani's sons and a number of other training families. So Nani is writing to him and. Do you want me to read the letter?
- [18:22]
A
Oh, go on then. Go on then.
- [18:23]
D
Okay. This is the traditional translations coming from the Oppenheim. I won't read the whole thing, but he says, tell Ao Natsio Nani sends the following message. When you came, you said to me as follows. I will give Gimil sin when he comes. Fine quality copper ingots. You left them, but you did not do what you promised me. You put ingots which were not good before my messenger and said, if you want to take them, take them. If you do not want to take them, go away. I mean, so he's setting up this sort of like take them or leave it. Yes, exactly. This is what supposedly Aaron said. And then this is the part I think that people really love. What do you take me for that you treat somebody like me with such contempt? I have sent as messengers, gentlemen like ourselves to collect the bag with my money deposited. You. But you have treated me with contempt by sending them back to me empty handed several times. And that through enemy territory. Actually, the word enemy is a little bit misleading here. It's really foreign territory. But anyway, is there anyone among the merchants who trade with Dilman who has treated me in this way? You alone treat my messenger with contempt. And then there's a bit that I don't actually agree with. The translation it says on account of one trifling mina of silver which I owe you. I don't think that's right, that there's a question mark in the translation. And I don't think he actually did owe him money. But anyway, he says, you feel free to speak in such a way. Well, I have given to the palace on your behalf, 1,080 pounds of copper. Of course, they didn't say pounds, they used a different. But that's been translated by the translator. And Shumi Abam has likewise given 1,080 pounds of copper, apart from what we have both written on a sealed tablet, to be kept in the temple of Shamish. So, stopping there for a minute. So this other guy, Shumi Abam, is also one of the investors that shows up in the letters. So these are people he knows well, right? And they have put copper into the temple of Shamash under seal, you know, which is important. And then he says, how have you treated me for that copper? You have withheld my money bag from me in enemy again foreign territory. It is now up to you to restore my money to me in full. Take cognizance. Then from now on, I will not accept here any copper from you that is not a fine quality. I shall from now on select and take the ingots individually in my own yard. And I shall exercise my right of rejection because you have treated me with contempt. I mean, it's just such a wonderful letter. He's so mad, right? You know, he's like, this is not how you treat me. I am a gentleman and gentlemen like us and so forth.
- [20:37]
A
But he does keep it. He keeps it in his house, though, to be fair to him, he doesn't throw it away. It seems like maybe he did take it on board.
- [20:44]
D
No, this is such an interesting thing because six of these letters are complaint letters. Oh, God.
- [20:50]
A
Oh, AA Nazi.
- [20:52]
D
I know, right? So he's not just keeping this one, he has five others and he's keeping them. And I'm really puzzled about this because you would think you would just toss it, right? I want to deal with this. My wonder is if it isn't that he might have been trying to solve the problems and therefore he was keeping the letters so that he was making sure that he did address their concerns. Within my field, Assyriology, there is a big debate as to whether a Nazir is actually a good merchant just being maligned by his. His investors or whether he really was kind of a flight. And there are arguments on both sides. My sense is we just don't have enough evidence. Because the problem is, you're right, he kept the letters. And that suggests that he was being conscientious and thinking, I need to do something about these and therefore I'll keep these letters and make sure that my fellow investors are assuaged. And another point is that people did tend to get a little bit hot under the collar when they wrote if they were feeling like they needed their money fast. But the problem is, is that we don't have a comparable corpus of letters by a good copper merchant, because AA Nazir's archive is the only one we have. So you can't really say, well, look at so and so down the street who. Everyone was happy when they wrote to him and they got good copper and everything was good. He's it, right? He's our archive. And so there's the possibility that he was a good merchant and people just wrote that way. My sense is that if you've got six letters complaining, I don't think he was probably the world's most reliable person. There are other letters in other types of fields of trade and so forth, and they tend to be nicer than these ones. They tend to be more just straightforward. Like, you know, they never said thank you for what you've sent because they just didn't really use the word thank you. But they would say, I've received the shipment and please send more and more, but I'm expecting your shipment in tomorrow or whatever. But the sort of level of annoyance that Nanny has is quite surprising. So I think perhaps he had his moments. But interestingly, and I've got the sort of summaries of some of the other letters that several of the authors of the complaint letters say send such and such so that so. And so will not become upset. And so there's clearly a whole web of people, people involved. And I think there you have. There's the person who comes to pick up the copper, there's a Nazi providing the copper, there are the investors there, there's someone who's going to be transporting it, there's someone who will be upset if it doesn't get to someone else. You know, those sorts of things. So it's. I think there's a vast amount of copper involved, which we know because from the other documents in his house, there are. I can't remember the. The numbers, but thousands of kilograms of copper that he's responsible for that are coming all the way from Dilman all the way on a boat. It's then being distributed in various ways. And you could see that if that starts collapsing as a system, if perhaps the copper isn't what people wanted, then they would have to go back to the guy who brought it to a Nazir, but mentioning all these other people who are involved in the transaction. So there's several of them, I think I've got four different letters where they say, act in such a way that Iddin Sin does not get upset. Give him good copper so that I will not become upset. You know, there's this sort of theme that you need to get this right or someone's going to be upset about it. That I think it's a sign that if not that he was regularly messing up, at least they, they sort of worried about him doing so and they worried about him. Yeah.
- [24:26]
A
Oh, poor.
- [24:36]
C
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- [25:05]
B
Everyone deserves to be connected. That's why T Mobile and US Cellular are joining forces. Switch to T Mobile and save up to 20% versus Verizon by getting built in benefits they leave out. Check the math@t mobile.com switch and now T mobile is in US cellular stores. Savings versus Comparable Verizon plans plus the cost of optional benefits plan features and taxes and fees vary. Savings with three plus lines include third line free via monthly bill credits. Credit stop if you cancel any lines. Qualifying credit required.
- [25:49]
A
I like that. There are some scholars who are trying to defend Ioanati's reputation, but I'm afraid the Internet has already cast judgment on him in the mean world. I mean I'm going to go through a few now and people can say some more in the comments. Please. Absolutely do. My favorite one is actually like from Pirates of the Caribbean one I think, and it's the British commander James Norrington or something like that. And he's in the original, he's talking to Captain Jack Sparrow when he's just been caught the, he's caught the pirate and he says, you know, you are without doubt the worst pirate I've ever seen. But in this one they've replaced a pirate. It's. He's, he's going, you are without a doubt the worst. Mesopotamian copper merchant I've ever heard of. And there's like that, that classic statue of a Nasir. And the other man said, ah, but you have heard of me. Oh, there's so many more. There's the Lord of the Rings. One began with the forging of the Great Rings, given to the elves immortal, wisest, fairest of them all. Seven to the dwarf Lords. And nine were gifted to the race of men who above all else, desire power. But they were all deceived, as all the rings were made from really shitty copper. There's a Natsia being Sauron in Mount Doom.
- [27:01]
D
Oh, I love these. We just have to believe he was a bad copper merchant to keep this all going. I mean, it's so good.
- [27:06]
A
Trump picks copper merchant aa Nazi as Secretary of State for Metallurgy. Money doesn't matter. Rich people, looks don't matter. Attractive people, copper quality doesn't matter. Copper merchants could go more. There's WhatsApp as well. People saying, give me it back. There's a copper colored Tesla and someone somehow ao Nazi has returned. And also people talking about if they could time travel, that the boys would go back and tell Nana, don't trust Ioanazia, he's gonna rip you off kind of thing.
- [27:35]
D
Oh, God.
- [27:37]
A
Okay, right, that's enough. But.
- [27:38]
D
Oh, that's fabulous. But you know what I think resonates for people is it's just so human. Right. I mean, we've all been there, right? We've been the person who's like, I am at my wits end. I cannot get Target to take back this. Whatever it is. You know, you just like, want to talk. Oh. You get the thing on the phone where you don't get a real human being and you're like, let me talk to someone. That sort of feeling comes through that letter and I feel ripped off. Yeah. Because it's 3,900 years ago, 2,800 years ago. It's just so surprising, you know, that there is this very, very familiar kind of interaction between people and yet it's incomprehensibly long ago for a lot of people. That and such a surprise. But of course, he's just one of so many thousands of people that we know so much about. It's so exciting that people care about him because there are so many more people they can care about as well that are equally human.
- [28:38]
A
Exactly. You've hit the nail on the head there. We've started with EO Natsir because this is a great story to get us rolling, but there are so many Other stories that we can focus on, and we will cover a few. But before we get into that, almost like a bit of a going away from the stories for a moment and talking more about the people who were carrying these letters, who were delivering them. Do we know much about what travel was like for these messengers who were carrying letters or goods at that time?
- [29:03]
D
I wish they'd written more themselves. We know about them because of what people write in the letters themselves. So they will talk about the letter that they're sending, or they'll talk about him sending a messenger with this letter. The people who carried them were all kinds of people. Some of the letters were carried by the scribe who wrote it. So they would, you know, write the letter and then take it themselves to where they were going. Sometimes they would give it to someone else, and that person might or might not have been literate, and they were just responsible for carrying it. There were even really important diplomats and envoys who had carried their own letters. But it wasn't a postal service. So it's not like you could sort of put it in the mailbox and somebody would pick it up and take it anonymously, stick your postage stamp. It was definitely a personal thing. So you would ask someone to take this message for you, or you would take it yourself. And the really striking thing, Tristan, about this is that that was the only way to communicate long distance. We have become, for the, you know, hundreds of years now, at least, since the invention of the train, I guess we realized that things can be moved with. Without a person physically walking there, right? You can get a message. And especially since the telegraph, you can get a message over a long distance almost instantly. We're so comfortable with that that it's hard to remember that it's really pretty recently that every single message you sent long distance physically had to be carried. And this is what I find so interesting because this is first instance of that. This is when we have that beginning. And it continued, as I say, right up until steam trains, I guess, that somebody had to take it in their hand and go off and carry the letter. And yet everything went incredibly smoothly. I mean, AO Nazi notwithstanding. In a way, though, even his letters show just how smoothly things went. Because he was able to get the copper when he needed it in Dilman, and people were able to get it from him. And they were. They may have complained about the quality, but it was a working system. And it just astonishes me how much that depended on these people just walking from one place to another to get the message to where it needed to go. And their experiences, as I say, must have been really, really interesting because they were the ones who would be using the roads, they would be traveling on the rivers. They would be needing to be bilingual in some cases, depending on how far they were traveling. Ianasia probably was bilingual. Whatever language they were speaking in Dilman, he would have had to know how to speak it. So there was a lot of interaction with other regions away from home by a surprisingly large number of people. And then, of course, the messengers got this letter. They didn't have street addresses. So notoriously, Woolley gave a Natsir a street address when he was excavating a door. He named the streets and gave them numbers, but those are not ancient. Those are just Woolley's creation. The streets were unnamed, the houses were unnumbered. So you were sent with a letter for Ao Natsio in Ur, Go find him. And there are no maps. And so they didn't have, let alone gps, which we're so dependent upon now. But. But even just a map showing where you were going, they would have a list of places that you would travel through. So that you had to go, you know, maybe first, if you were going from Babylon north, you'd go to Sippar, and after you went from Sippar, you'd go onto the next city. And so you knew which city to get to one after another to get to the place you were going. And when you got to that city, people would know how to get to the next city. You know, they would be able to give you directions. And then when you got to the city where you were delivering the letter, presumably you just said, where does Ao Natsu live? And somebody would know and they would direct you there. But it's an experience that sounds very much as though it would be slow and complicated. And yet it seems to have worked really, really well. And it was what they did for centuries, that was just how you sent letters.
- [32:46]
A
I mean, surely there must be a couple of examples or it must have happened where, you know, recipients no longer at address or something like that, you know, or like almost the equivalent of like new phone, who dis at the same time, you know, where, like, you know, it's sent to the wrong place or the wrong person and so on, because the person it was intended for has moved and they haven't let them know and stuff like that.
- [33:08]
D
Well, there are letters certainly where people. There's one I was working on recently where a man writes to his partner, who is a business partner, and he said, basically, you sent the grain to the wrong location. Because I've moved, you know, and I've moved on. He's traveling, and some grain that was being sent to one place went to where he had been, not where he was now. And it was. Or maybe it wasn't grain, it was some other shipment. So, yes, things went to the wrong place because it took a long time. And if you've got. If you've sent a letter and it's traveled a couple of weeks to get to where your recipient is, and then the recipient has to send whatever goods you've asked for back to where you were, that's assuming a month later you're in the same place, you have no way of letting him know that you've moved. Right. Because by the time you've done so, the other shipment's already been sent. So, yes, that kind of thing did happen. Things went to the wrong place. I think most striking are the letters that are sort of a little bit plaintive where somebody will say, ever since you went to Babylon, I haven't heard from you. Would you please tell me how you are doing? I think if there was too long of a gap between letters, people started to worry. Are you okay? Have you had an accident? Did your boat sink? How do you know? So they would expect to get pretty regular correspondence to know that the person was still doing okay, was still. Still alive. And for whatever reason, there's several of them about Babylon. People seem to go to Babylon and disappear. They're just having a good time. Sorry, not. Not in touch exactly.
- [34:32]
A
Get carried away.
- [34:33]
D
But the other thing, too, is that if things were going fine, they didn't write letters. So we tend not to have the letters that would be the ones of, like, having a nice time. Wish you were here. They wouldn't send that.
- [34:42]
A
We should go back to some more stories. Now. We've done a nats here, but I know that there are a couple more that are very close to your heart. So do you have some favorite letters that capture just how human these writers were?
- [34:54]
D
I do. I do. I have a number of them. One of them is one that was also in the book of Letters from Mesopotamia where Nazir's letter was first published. And I've used it for years and years and years with my students because I think it's the one that, for them, resonates the most in terms of their own lives. And it's a letter by a young man. I mean, he's probably maybe in his late teens, and he wrote a letter to his mother. Now, this one is Actually getting a little bit of Internet traction too, lately, I've noticed. But he writes to his mother and he says, tell the lady Zenu Idin Sin sends the following message. And that sounds really formal. It, you know, we would say, dear mom, but this is just how everybody addressed their letters. So he's writing to his mother and then he gives a little request for the gods to take care of her, which they did at the beginning of every letter. But then he goes, he says, from year to year, the clothes of the young gentleman here become better, but you let my clothes get worse from year to year. Indeed, you persisted in making my clothes poorer and more scanty at a time when in our house, wool is used up like bread. You have made me poor clothes. The son of Adad Adina, whose father is only an assistant of my father, has two new sets of clothes while you fuss about even a single set of clothes for me, in spite of the fact that you bore me. And his mother adopted him. His mother loves him, while you, you do not love me. I just love that. It's just so good. He's just like, I need better clothes and I am going to manipulate my mother into sending them by making her feel so guilty.
- [36:26]
A
Oh, my days. Yeah, I just typed it into Google search engine at the same time, I couldn't find any memes, but there is a Reddit page and it just says, spoiled brat from ancient Babylon writes to his mum complaining that she doesn't buy him enough fancy clothes.
- [36:38]
D
Exactly. But he's not buying them, she's making them.
- [36:42]
A
Right, Making them.
- [36:42]
D
Exactly. So they're made in the household. Well, she probably had weavers who worked for her. His dad, we know a lot more about him than that letter suggests. His father was a man named Shamash Hazir, who was a high official for Hammurabi. And Shamsh Hazir's archive has been found, and this letter was in that archive, so it was among his personal documents, but they all. He also has his business documents and his wife was Zinu and she ran the household when her husband was away. And clearly at this point, the son is away, maybe he's doing some kind of service for the state or something like that. But he's definitely concerned that he needs to look the part. You know, his dad is Shamish Hazir. He needs to look like he's someone important and his clothes are not up to it. And. But the sort of like, you do not love me at the end. Oh, my goodness, that's classic. But again, this we don't know much about Edinson, that is his only letter, but we know a lot about his family. And you can see the context in which this letter was written. And some really striking things come out from it, which is that the number of sets of clothes he has. He says he only has a single set of clothes. That's not that unusual because fabric was so expensive and time consuming to make. You couldn't just go and buy your clothes at the local store. You had them made at home by weavers or by your mother. If it was a poorer family, she would weave at the family's clothing. And interestingly, people were very much identified with their clothes. So that if you wanted to sign something in ancient Mesopotamia, you would seal it with your cylinder seal. But some people didn't have a cylinder seal. And if you were poor, you wouldn't have one. And so you would put that an impression of the hem of your garment in place of a cylinder seal. And that would be considered to be so closely related to you, so much a part of you, that that was as much of a sort of assertion of your willingness to do whatever the contract said or to abide by it, that it counted in place of a cylinder seal.
- [38:41]
A
I think completely. I think sometimes in the world that we live in, post industrial age, you know, where we could just go down to the shops and buy clothes and it's very easy. We forget about how back then people made clothes at home and it was such a big task and it was, you know, it was usually associated with the mother or the women, wasn't it, in the household? And this is, once again, this is letter. It shines a light on that, you know, something that you'll see across cultures. I think there's a Vindolanda letter as well about a soldier asking for socks. I don't know if it's to his mum or not, but once again, it's a similar thing, isn't it? It's the requesting of clothing from someone that they know. And in this case it's from this young adult, high ranking adult to his mum.
- [39:25]
D
It's lovely. Yes, exactly. I have another letter. May I?
- [39:28]
A
Yes, absolutely. Let's go on to the next one.
- [39:30]
D
Okay. Okay. So this one is another one that is about children, but this is about a very, very small child. So the letter is written by a man who was the secretary of a king. And the king was named Zimri Lim. He was the king of Mari. And so he says, say to my lord, thus says Shu Nukhachalu. Your servant concerning the infant Yarim Lim. Now the limb part of his name suggests he might be a member of the royal family, but he's an infant. This infant Yarim Lim, about whom my lord has written to me, I spoke to Hammurabi. Now this is not Hammurabi of Babylon. This is another Hammurabi. Hammurabi said to me, winter is arriving. How could this child travel? Come now. If this child goes along with the horses, the oxen, and whatever gifts I would convey to my brother Simrilem that accompany the youngster with all the muck and cold, how could he go? He simply cannot travel. He suckles. Now he is still a baby not yet weaned. The child is just two months old. He must be weaned first until better times. It would not be good to transport him. This is what Hammurabi replied to me. So I love this one because you have this baby, right? It's wintertime. They think the baby needs to travel to Mari. And this guy Hammurabi, whoever this Hammurabi is, is going, this is not a smart idea. You do not put a baby on a wagon with a bunch of muck and assume he's going to make it safely in the wintertime to the palace. It's. It's just such a common sense sort of thing. But it evokes such an interesting moment where Zimmer Lim has simply said, bring the baby. And he's like, hold on, think about that. That's going to be a bit of a. Bit of a challenge. There's a lot of things that the baby needs and one of them is probably at two months old, not being put in a wagon with a bunch of gifts.
- [41:21]
C
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- [41:51]
B
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- [42:35]
A
Do you think it also kind of shines a light on the king perhaps being a bit, well, ignorant towards, like, how to look after a baby and then his daughter also showing how she can talk to her dad, even though you know he's the king to say? Actually, I think you need to think about this again. I don't think you quite understand how babies work.
- [42:54]
D
Exactly. Actually, this is a man who's writing it. The secretary? No, he's a man. But there are several things about moving babies around. And one of the things they always say is the baby needs to be with his mother or his nurse or her nurse. You cannot just put a baby somewhere and assume the baby's gonna be fine. So, yes, I think Simri Lim might have been a little bit out of touch with what the needs of babies might be.
- [43:19]
A
Well, I believe you probably have got another letter for us, don't you, Amanda?
- [43:22]
D
I don't have it to read, but there is. I can tell you, because it's a whole correspondence, but a series of letters that again, Zimri Lim. In this case, it's his daughter. And his daughter was named Hiram. He had a number of daughters. I think he had 11. And he married them off to various local kings and officials because diplomatic marriage was an important way of keeping the kingdom united. And so there was a king named Hayasumu. And Hayasumu was a very difficult battle of Zimri Lims. He was someone who tended to fly off the handle. He was someone who was erratic. He would make an allegiance, an alliance with someone or so, pledge allegiance to one king, and then he would turn around and switch his allegiance. And so Zimri Lim had already married one of his daughters to Hayasumu. And that had worked well for her, but she got along well with her husband, which means that she actually turned on her father. So that was not good for him. He was even accusing her of witchcraft and things. So. So first daughter went off, became a bit of a problem. Second daughter, Kyram is sent off to marry Hayasuma. And we have a series of letters from the daughter. And it's. It's less common to get letters from women. You know, they. Most of the letters are from men. Not all of them, though. And this daughter, Kirum, sent what must have been very confidential letters because she managed to get them out of the kingdom where she was staying and back to her dad because they were found in his palace. And they get increasingly nervous and anxious to come home. She is initially not allowed her maids. They're taken away. And then she starts complaining that Hayasumu is being dismissive of her and that he's going to be, and he starts threatening her. And so these. Actually, it's quite concerning. I mean, the others have been a bit flippant, but these ones, I think, really kind of shine a spotlight on a woman who is genuinely afraid for her safety. But the very sweet thing about them is how much she trusts her dad to rescue her, that he. And, and he. There are letters from him showing that he was indeed trying to rescue her, that she asks for chariot to be sent to pick her up so that she can get back home. And she, at one point, she's so desperate, she says, you know, send it or I'm going to throw myself off the roof. I mean, she is really terrified. And the really sad thing about this correspondence is you're reading it and you're going, what's going to happen to her next? Is she going to be okay? And then we don't hear. There's like no other letters. So we have no other letters. But I think that's a good sign. I think had something happened, we would have had letters, you know, Kirim's been killed by Hayasumu. And they obviously Zimri Lim at that point would have gone to war against his vassal because he wouldn't have accepted that. So the very fact that there's silence, I think means she was probably okay. And once she's back at the palace, nobody needs to write anything, right, because she's there with dad. So that's the way I see it. I think that although there was this very stressful moment in her life that probably it was resolved. And once you live in the same city, you don't have to write letters. You know, she would at that point have been back at the school, same palace with her father. But the sort of care for her that he reflects in his attempts to, to rescue her is really touching. And her description of her relationship with her sister, which was very fraught. That's. That's interesting too. There's. There's all of these dynamics that you don't think about when you just hear, oh, there was a diplomatic marriage.
- [46:44]
A
Yes.
- [46:45]
D
You know, whereas if the, if the relationship between the two kings wasn't good, the relationship between the Bethel king and his wife could be bad. All sorts of fascinating aspects like that. And so that's a big example completely.
- [46:59]
A
In so many of these ancient societies. You know, the diplomatic marriages where we usually make it quite clear that, you know, the princesses are effectively just pawns and they're given to X, Y and Z to secure a political agreement or, you know, secure borders and so on. But at least with this letter, they become a bit more than that. And actually you see the human side behind it and actually the fact that hopefully in this case, no, we don't know for sure, but the king actually saw that his daughter, his beloved daughter, was in trouble and got her back home and, you know, away from this marriage, which is just nice compared to that thing.
- [47:31]
D
Yeah. And interestingly, they weren't. Although, yes, the marriages were set up as though they were just pawns in a chess game. But once they got there, and this was true of another of Zimmer Lim's daughters, they kind of become spies for their dad. And they, they're living in the court and they would write these letters which are surprisingly frank about what's going on in their husband's court, which means that they had messengers who were coming from the father, taking messages back to the father without the husband apparently seeing them, because it doesn't seem as though he'd necessarily okayed the message. And so they become very much almost like a resident ambassador in the court of the person that they've married, but still have this close tie with their father. And so you see that for hundreds of years that, that seems to have been a continuing relationship. So they're not powerless at all. These are women who. They're powerless over who they marry. Yes, they're sent to marry a particular person, but once they're there, they become some of the most important people in their father's foreign policy, which I find very interesting.
- [48:30]
A
Very, very interesting indeed. Okay, well, let's look at one more example because it's here in my notes and it includes the well known Egyptian pharaoh who I think we've also briefly covered when we did the Bronze Age Brotherhood of Kings, Akhenaten. He liked a good letter, didn't he?
- [48:47]
D
He did. Oh my goodness, yes. I actually mentioned that because of this issue of the bad copper, because Akhenaten was notorious for not sending the gifts that he had promised. And so whereas in Ionatio's case, it was that his copper was supposedly bad, probably not refined enough or something, in Akhenaten's case, he sometimes just didn't send things. And then when he did, he was accused by the kings he sent them to often of not sending what he'd promised. So there's an example where he had promised to send some gold and he sent it to Babylon. And the Babylonian king writes back and he said, I know you sent this gold sort of in good faith, and it must be just because someone other than you sealed the the bag. But when I put this gold in the kiln, nothing came up. Meaning that it. He doesn't mean nothing. He means there was very little gold, that it was perhaps alloyed with something else, or perhaps it was gold plated bricks, or who knows? But it was not the solid gold that Akhenaten had promised. And so there he's giving Akhenaten an out. He's saying, wasn't your fault. Next time just make sure you check the gold. Not your, quote, trustworthy official who was ripping me off. But then another king was waiting and waiting and waiting for statues of solid gold that were promised to him. And Akhenaten finally sent him statues which were wooden with gold leaf on them. And again, he was sort of, why would you send me these gold leaf statues when you promised me solid gold? And that same tone of, you know, Nani's tone in his letter to Ayan at sir of like, I wanted something and you've sent me something different. But the difference with the kings is that whereas Nani takes this very sort of imperious tone with Ao Natsir, I think he's probably seeing himself as the superior partner and he's berating a Nazir. The kings couldn't do that. They had to always be polite to each other and always maintain this sort of pretense of, well, you would never have meant to do this, I realize, and I'm sure the gold statues are still on their way.
- [50:52]
A
But it's rather relatable today, isn't it? Maybe not the king's bit, but almost like sending an email to someone. If you sent them an email but they haven't replied yet, and you're just like, oh, I'm sure you're just really, really busy and this has got lost in the ether, but reply to this now kind of thing. So as you say, as you brilliantly surmised, it gives them an out at the start, but it also underlines you want something done about it.
- [51:16]
D
Yes. Yeah. And there's. And, and, and it's interesting because the letters are mostly very civil and very polite. They find ways of sort of in a passive aggressive way of saying what they want to say, but There's. There are a few letters where they break that sort of fourth wall and they come out and say, we aren't supposed to say this, but we just have to say, you just need to pay us back, you know, and. And. And it says there's. There's a letter that says we are having to do what gentlemen don't do, which is, to be blunt, you know, we are going to have to say this. And that, I think, is very telling. There's. There's one last letter. I've got so many of them, but there's one. This was in Brotherhood of Kings, actually, where a king of Katna was writing to the King of Aam, and he says exactly that. He says, I'm going to have to say what I is never said, which is that you sent me a gift that wasn't very good and it wasn't worth what I, you know, I gave you really beautiful. I gave you horses, I gave these amazing horses and you sent me back some tin. Tin is not worth what the horses are worth. And so he's saying what is supposedly unsaid, you know, like it's supposed to be. We're supposed to be good to each other, we're supposed to do the right thing. And you didn't do the right thing. Yeah.
- [52:26]
A
What did I send you? I sent you gold. You sent me poor quality copper by this guy called, er. Natsir. What the hell are you doing? Imagine if you found that. That would be quite something.
- [52:35]
D
That would be good. Yes.
- [52:37]
A
Amanda, this has been such a fun chat and the things I'm taking away from it. I mean, one, the judgment is still out, despite the Amean world having already decided. Two, like how relatable these letters are to us today, which just is so lovely to get that insight, even. Even the kings, but obviously more focusing on the people beneath. And three, I guess how efficient communication was in this Bronze Age world, how interconnected this world was. And letters is a great way to see that.
- [53:08]
D
It's really true. I'm more and more struck by this. The more letters that I'm reading from my research, that it was a system that worked really, really well and that there were a lot of people involved in it and a lot of understood connections. And I think a lot of it was that they had these networks of people that they worked with and that they knew and that would then help them to find someone in another town that they could work with there. It was all very, very much about human connection and about these unwritten rules of civility and of getting things done fast, you know, making sure that a letter was replied to, that, that a, a shipment of something was sent when you would say that you were going to send it. Because as unlike today, we can't. They couldn't just text and say, hey, hasn't arrived yet. You had this such a long process to get the materials and there was no real way to check up on it except to trust that the people were going to follow through. And there is a lot of trust in their system and a lot of what seemed to be actually really sort of hard working, conscientious people who were not always nasty to each other. I think that's the one thing that perhaps A.O. nazir has given a slightly misapprehension about, which is the sort of the sense that. Were they all this rude to each other? No, no, no, that's not the case.
- [54:30]
A
Last but certainly not least, the least we can do is have you mention the books that you have written on this topic in the past, which cover this amazing Bronze Age world.
- [54:41]
D
The one that I mentioned, Brotherhood of Kings, which came out in 2010. That one is about diplomacy, but it's also a lot about trade. And again, that was where Ioannacio made his first appearance in my life. Anyway. Then I did a book called the Ancient Near East. A very short introduction, which my books tend to be long. That one is not long, that one is very short. Then the most recent one is Weavers, Scribes and A New History of the Ancient Near East.
- [55:05]
A
That's the one much bigger, which is very, very chunky book, but a very, very highly received. It's everything you need to know about the ancient near east, from kings to everyday people. It's brilliant.
- [55:16]
D
Lots of everyday people. I mean, that's one of the things I was really trying with that book was to get more of the stories of the kinds of things we've been talking about. The people, the weavers and the scribes, not just the kings and their lives. And a lot of that book is based on letters. Actually one of my favorite primary sources for working to understand people's lives in that whole 3,000 years of history that are covered in that book is the letters.
- [55:38]
A
The interest in Mesopotamia has rocketed and I don't know how you found it in the academic sphere over the past years. Have you seen firsthand this interest of Mesopotamia? Go to another level? Because I feel I have from the outside.
- [55:53]
D
It's nice to hear that you're feeling it too. I'm never sure if I'm hearing from People just because they've read my book, one of my books, or if it's a wider phenomenon. But I would love to think so, because the thing is, it's 3,000 years of history. I mean, it is so much history. It's so rich. And we have so much documentation, and we have documentation of a kind that one really doesn't have for almost any other ancient culture. These documents that were not meant to survive, they're not all literary, they're not all royal inscriptions. There's enormous. I mean, the vast majority of materials that survive were not intended to. And that means that we can look at aspects of social history and economic history that are so difficult for most of the ancient world. And. And it's such a vibrant civilization. It's so full of interesting people. So I hope you're right. I really do. I think that's deserved because it is just such a rich source of information for what is really the beginning of people living in cities. And I think people have oftenest sense. My students, when they come to class for the first time, they think, oh, this is so long ago. They must have all just been killing each other all the time. And they didn't have any laws and they just behave that primitive.
- [56:59]
A
Yes.
- [56:59]
D
Yeah, that sort of. Yes. Image. And not true at all. Right. From the very first cities, people were finding ways that they could live peacefully with each other. And they had these big social networks and. And they were close to their families. They were good people. Obviously there were some seriously bad kings and there was some brutality that we, you know, that happened. But when you look at the scale of the average person, you do really see that they weren't arbitrarily violent or anything like that at all.
- [57:29]
A
Amanda, this has been such a wonderful chat as always. It just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast today.
- [57:36]
D
Thank you very much, much for having me. I've really enjoyed it.
- [57:41]
A
Well, there you go. There was Dr. Amanda Podani returning to the show to talk through the amazing story of the world's first letters, the oldest letters, some 4,000 years ago. I hope you enjoyed this episode just as much as I did recording it. It's wonderful to cover the story of Eha Nazir and so many others. So, yes, hope to see more AAR memes in the future, and hopefully you can hearken back to his career in some funny comments too. For this episode, we'll be keeping an eye out for those, so get thinking. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Ancients. Please follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favor. If you'd be kind enough to leave us a rating as well. Well, we'd really appreciate that. And not a bad bad rating like AAT 0k. Don't forget you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. Sign up@ww.historyhit.com subscribe. That's all from me. I'll see you in the next episode.
- [58:58]
B
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- [59:27]
A
What's going on? I'm Archie Manning, Vuori athlete and college quarterback. Whether I'm running, training, traveling or just.
- [59:31]
B
Unwinding at home, I love doing it.
- [59:32]
A
In my core shorts from Vuori. With a breathable box of brief liner, they're quick to dry, super versatile and stand up to even my most intense training sessions. Plus they come in three inseams and a ton of colors. Ready to try a pair? Go to vuori.com arch and get 20% off at checkout. I think you're going to love them as much as I do. That's V-U-O-R-I.com arch and get 20% off your first order. Exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions.
- [59:52]
B
Not only will you receive 20% off.
- [59:53]
A
Your first purchase, but enjoy free shipping on any US orders over $75 and free returns. Have a great day.