They say you die three times, first when the body dies, second, when your body enters the grave, and third, when your name is spoken for the last time. You were a normal person in life, but hundreds of years later, you still haven’t had your “third” death. You decide to find out why.
You sold some shitty copper, man, I don’t know what to tell you
This is hilarious but also… deeply intriguing to my mind
Specifically, for the implication that Ea-Nasir was “a normal person” in life.
Because this man lived in an era when communications could only be kept in the form of clay tablets… and keeping them at all was not the common thing to do, as it wasted valuable clay that was meant to be reused for future correspondence…
And yet he seems to have kept an entire house full of… hate mail from his angry customers
which only ended up preserved til the present day because the clay was accidentally fired as his house burned down
Surely this behavior cannot have been considered normal in his time…
So, to tell this story, in which Ea-Nasir was a normal person… we must postulate that he had a reason for doing this
…a circumstance which would have explained it, by the contemporary society’s standards for normality.
Thus… it would probably have to be a story of Ea-Nasir trying to collect evidence of persecution …in the vain hope someone, someday, might believe him
A story of Ea-Nasir wrongfully accused. Of a vendetta from an enemy, unjustly spiteful over some small slight
…gathering an army of unscrupulous followers, all showering his mailbox with character assassination…
Of the victim collecting the evidence of harassment, keeping it in desperate hope of vindication, isolating himself from any non-vital communication as he scrimped and saved his clay, to make up what he was storing away like this…
All in vain.
For his enemies resorted to arson, before his defense could ever be heard by a just court.
An ancient Mespotamian allegory, perhaps, for Tumblr’s culture of “dogpile the marginalized poster we don’t like, forever and ever, until the mods just give up and accept that there must be something against the terms of service in those innocuous-looking posts”
An allegory to place us, for a moment, in the shoes of those mods… to make us understand the grievous error of their ways, and how it occurred.
JusticeForEaNasir.
The One who Kept the Receipts.