A man in the city of Ur had bought copper from the same merchant for years. This time he opened the delivery and was furious. So he sat down with a scribe and had a message pressed into wet clay: the copper was dreadful, give me back what I paid, or I will never buy from you again.
The merchant was Ea-Nasir. His customer's tablet now sits in the British Museum, which acquired it in 1953. Guinness World Records lists it as the oldest written customer complaint, and names the buyer as Nanni. A study by UCL's Gabriel Moshenska, reported by IFLScience in January 2026, traces how the letter, dated to around 1750 BCE, became an internet meme.
Ivan Semyan, an archaeologist who digs in Armenia and works with New York University Abu Dhabi, tells the story with a smile. A one-star review is a very old habit. But he adds a guess about what sat behind this one, and it turns an angry note into something larger: a possible skirmish in a trade war.
Start with Ea-Nasir's business. He was a merchant of Ur who sailed to the island of Dilmun, today's Bahrain, bought copper there, and sold it at home. Dilmun was a middleman. The metal came from Magan, a kingdom on the coast of what is now the Emirates and Oman, where mountains such as Jebel Hafit are rich in copper. For much of the late third millennium BCE it was Mesopotamia's main source.
Then a rival appeared. Early in the second millennium, the island of Cyprus, home of the kingdom of Alasiya, stepped up its mining. The island's name is the clue: cuprum, copper. Its metal was cleaner and better for making tin bronze. Egypt, which was closer to Cyprus, started buying there.
Some of that Cypriot copper reached Mesopotamia too. It cost more, because it was better and travelled much farther. Merchants like Ea-Nasir kept buying the Magan metal as well, probably because it was cheaper to deliver, and by all signs it was the poorer stuff.
Semyan's bet is that this is where Ea-Nasir tripped. Perhaps his customer had once bought the good Cypriot grade, or been promised it. Then a shipment of Magan copper turned up under the same name. A buyer who expected one metal and got the other would write exactly this kind of letter. On this reading the tablet is a small piece of evidence from a contest between two producers, one in the Gulf and one on an island in the Mediterranean.
It is a guess, and Semyan treats it as one. The tablet itself does not say where the copper came from.
One of the buyers was very unhappy with the quality of this copper, and wrote to him: I've been buying from you for a long time, but this time it was absolutely terrible copper.
Один из покупателей остался очень недоволен качеством этой меди, и написал ему, что я у тебя давно покупаю, но в этот раз это было совершенно ужасная медь
— Ivan Semyan, Osnova, 51:39
Why would anyone still be able to read such an argument? Because Bronze Age correspondence was kept like a filing cabinet. A letter arrived and was read aloud. The reply was written in two copies. One went out, and the other was fastened to the original and stored, "naturally" in a cupboard, Semyan says. Months later you could pull out the pair and prove who had asked for what. A dispute over copper could be argued from the file.
Today the phrase "trade war" belongs to tariffs and headlines. Semyan's picture of the Bronze Age version has reed ships sealed with bitumen, a sea crossing out of sight of land, and a merchant in Ur who, on one bad delivery, lost a regular customer. The oldest bad review we have may not be about one dishonest seller at all. It may have been the first sign, on a clay tablet, of the supply route that Ea-Nasir was standing in the middle of.
