4 ms·
I love the inscribed metadata at the top: Tell Ea-nasir: Nanni sends the following message: It’s like an email header for a clay tablet.
by booleandilemma 9y ago
I love the inscribed metadata at the top:
Tell Ea-nasir: Nanni sends the following message:
It’s like an email header for a clay tablet.
- hprotagonist 9y agowell into the early modern era, letters were written as if they were speech. this explains the three paragraphs of flowery hellos at the opening of most old letters — it’s written as if the writer is standing in front of the reader and speaking.
- jff 9y agoI found that line quite interesting. The wording seems to imply that someone is going to read this tablet to Ea-nasir, and possibly that someone wrote the tablet on behalf of Nanni. In an age before near-universal literacy (i.e. most of human history), that makes sense: Ea-nasir would have summoned someone to read out the tablet. Given Ea-nasir's position as a presumably well-off trader, he may have simply had a scribe on-staff to handle his correspondence--an early instance of the modern PR hack?
- pavel_lishin 9y agoI think it's literally just the equivalent of an envelope - a "to" field and a "from" field, so that any messenger in charge of deliveries can, at a glance, tell to whom this message is meant to be delivered, and to return it to the sender if it's undeliverable. I wonder if ancient Ur had dodgy FedEx delivery guy equivalents who would knock on your door and toss the tablet in the dirt and mark it as "delivered".
- yellowapple 9y ago"knock on your door and toss the tablet in the dirt" At least then it'd be delivered (as opposed to the normal FedEx approach of "knocking" by slapping a missed delivery slip on the door).