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They also invented selling subpar copper, which led to the invention of writing to customer service about said subpar copper.
The Sumerians had fine metallurgy! Don't let one guy set their reputation. One admittedly very silly guy but nevertheless
They must have, otherwise that person wouldn't be so angry to have received the inferior stuff! They expected much better.
Strictly speaking, and to take a joke way too seriously, the shitty copper actually wasn't even from Mesopotamia. Ea-Nasir was part of a guild that imported stuff from Dilmun, which was centred on modern day Bahrain. Ea-Nasir was basically running bronze age Temu
I don't know if I was supposed to read it like a Bill Wurtz video. But I did.
The sun is a deadly laser!
Farmers today don’t talk about much else, either.
The difference is now farmers are only 2% of the population so our tablets are full of other inane ramblings instead.
They used a monopoly card to take everyone's clay, which significantly delayed the other players' settlements
Do we really know that's the extent though. There are hundreds of thousands that haven't been deciphered. Maybe they wrote limericks, we don't know.
We know it's not the entire extent because we also have a bunch of their literature and history in cuneiform. We even have some jokes! Although none of the ones I have read really survive the translation and time gap... at all. However, stuff like agricultural records are the bulk of it by the numbers simply because that was the stuff that was useful to ordinary people day to day
Apparently they also documented the effects of too much beer on the human mind. Potentially some of the first records of alcoholism?
Oh, interesting! I suppose that makes sense, given that humans have been drinking beer for millennia longer than we've been writing. The first society to start writing probably would talk about beer a fair bit. I've seen prayers about and recipes for beer before (sometimes the same text), but not the one you described
Semi-related: when I went to have a look for texts about drunkenness, I learned about the Dialogue of Two Scribes. It's amazing. It's literally just 130+ lines of back-and-forth insults
There's a great Tasting History episode about Ancient Mesopotamian beer and their writings around it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gK4DMt8ARyU
I appreciate the reminder of this, I had been meaning to try the recipe and completely forgot
Fun fact, mesopotamian beer was drank through a straw because they did not filter it. They'd simply let the solids fall to the bottom and sip off the liquid
There once was a man who had feet
There was not too much else he could eat
He had a long look at his arm
Thought with this I could farm
And that is why we have wheat
this an ancient poem?
Yes, provided you wait a few thousand years.
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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