Around 1750 BC, in the city of Ur, a man named Nanni paid for a delivery of copper that turned up substandard.

He was furious. Specifically, he was furious in a way you immediately recognise. He had paid the merchant, the merchant had been rude to his servant, the goods were not as advertised, and the whole transaction reeked of being cheated.

So he did what any modern customer would do. He wrote a complaint letter.

His letter survives. It is in the British Museum. It is etched into a small clay tablet, about the size of a modern smartphone, and it is the oldest written customer complaint in human history.

“Who do you think you are, treating someone like me with such contempt?” Nanni writes. “Is there anyone else among the traders who deal with Dilmun who has treated me this way? Only you treat my messenger with contempt!”

Read that out loud and you’ll notice something strange. It doesn’t sound like an ancient document. It sounds like a one-star Amazon review.

A man who was, apparently, terrible at business

The merchant in question was named Ea-nāṣir. He was a copper dealer in the Sumerian city of Ur, and based on the archaeological record, he was extremely bad at his job.

Archaeologists found Nanni’s complaint inside Ea-nāṣir’s own house. They also found other complaints, from other customers, also kept inside his house. He had apparently been collecting them. The picture that emerges from the tablets is of a serial scammer with a small but devoted hate club, all of whom wrote letters describing exactly what he had done to them and how angry they were about it.

People named Arbituram, Appa, Ilsu-ellatsu, and Ili-idinnam all lodged complaints with him by name. He had, by modern standards, terrible Yelp reviews. The internet didn’t exist for another 3,750 years, but the dynamics were already in place. Bad service, public grievance, a written record passed around for posterity.

The only difference between Ea-nāṣir and a modern bad seller is that Ea-nāṣir’s worst reviews have outlasted his civilisation.

They also wrote love letters

Around the same era, give or take a couple of centuries, an unnamed young woman in Sumer was preparing for her wedding to King Shu-Sin.

She wrote him a love poem. It survives, etched into a small clay tablet, and is held at the Istanbul Archaeological Museums under the catalogue number Istanbul 2461. It is widely considered the oldest known love poem in human history.

“Bridegroom, dear to my heart,” she writes, “Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet, lion, dear to my heart.”

The poem goes on, and the more of it you read, the more clearly you notice that the texture of human longing has not changed at all in four thousand years. It’s the same intensity, the same physical fixation, the same teenage breathlessness. If you stripped the names out and posted it on TikTok under a sunset video, nobody would think twice.

And lullabies, and complaints about babies

Babylonian tablets from around the same broader region contain something else that feels strangely familiar — recorded lullabies, written down by scribes, complete with detailed advice on how to soothe a crying infant.

One particular Babylonian lullaby reads like a passive-aggressive note left for a child who won’t sleep. The tablet, held at Yale, scolds the baby for waking the household gods, threatens minor supernatural consequences, and then — eventually — gets around to the actual soothing part.

“Little one, who dwelled in darkness, now you’ve come and seen the sun. Why the crying? Why the worries? What has made your peace undone? You have roused the household spirits; you have scared the guardian-gods.”

If you’ve ever stood in a nursery at 3am trying to convince a wailing infant to please, please, for the love of god, go back to sleep — you recognise the tone exactly. The lullaby is half lullaby, half exhausted-parent monologue. Four thousand years apart, the parental experience hasn’t shifted by an inch.

What this collection of clay actually tells us

The temptation, looking at ancient civilisations, is to assume the people in them were somehow fundamentally different. That the ones who built ziggurats and worshipped Inanna and lived without electricity must have had different concerns, different emotional registers, different daily preoccupations than we do.

The tablets keep telling us the opposite.

The Sumerians were worried about getting ripped off by tradesmen. They were writing breathless love letters to their fiancés. They were singing songs to their crying babies and quietly losing their minds in the process. They were arguing about the price of copper, about late shipments, about who treated whose messenger rudely.

If you’d dropped a smartphone into Nanni’s hand in 1750 BC, he would have used it for almost exactly the same things you use yours for. He would have posted his complaint about Ea-nāṣir publicly. He would have screenshotted the messages. He would have, eventually, tagged the local chamber of commerce.

The technology has changed. The substrate has changed. The complaints used to be carved into wet clay with a reed stylus, and now they’re typed into a glowing rectangle with our thumbs.

What people complain about has not changed at all.

We are, give or take a few thousand years, exactly the same animals. We just got better rectangles.

What the tablets are still doing

Nanni’s tablet is, right now, sitting in a glass case in London. People walk past it every day. Most of them don’t realise what they’re looking at — they see another piece of cuneiform, another small clay rectangle in a row of small clay rectangles.

What they’re actually looking at is the moment a person, four thousand years dead, decided that someone had wronged them and that the wronging needed to be written down.

He won. Ea-nāṣir’s name has been preserved across four millennia, and the only thing anyone remembers about him is that he was, in 1750 BC, the worst copper salesman in the world.

That’s not justice. But it’s something.

And the message is still sitting there in the British Museum, patient as it has always been, waiting for the next person to read it and notice that nothing, at the bottom of the human experience, has actually changed.