The World's Oldest Letters

What do the world’s first letters reveal about life in the Bronze Age? Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr Amanda Podany to uncover the remarkable written culture of ancient Mesopotamia, when clay tablets carried messages across vast distances and a proto-postal system linked cities like Ur and Babylon. From royal correspondence and diplomatic negotiations to worried family notes and furious consumer complaints -including the iconic rant against the merchant Ea-Nasir for terrible copper - these texts offer a vivid, relatable window into everyday life 4,000 years ago. Step into the earliest age of writing and discover how humanity first learned to communicate across time and space. Translations in this episode taken from A. Leo Oppenheim, Letters from Mesopotamia (1967) & J. M. Sasson, From the Mari Archives (2015). Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the Headline Hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithGemini.

• 1:08Tristan Hughes?

  Hello, I hope you're doing well. I'm all good. I'm now back from my swift venture up to Edinburgh. I'm back at my desk. And at the time that I'm doing this intro, I've just finished recording this episode. And guys, it's amazing. It's all about the world's oldest letters from some 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. We're going to cover loads of different stories, including that of the ancient world's most memed and most derided copper merchant, a man called Aya Natseya. Now, I'm sure a few of you are already getting very, very excited, and it is really, really fascinating. Our guest, who brings these stories to life, is Dr. Amanda Podani, Professor Emeritus of History at California State Polytechnic and another of our fan favorite guests on the show.

• 1:52Tristan Hughes?

  We had a lot of fun, and I really do hope you enjoy. Let's go.

• 2:08Tristan Hughes?

  Four thousand years ago, in Mesopotamia, the written word became widespread for the first time. People began corresponding with each other over great distances, with messages being delivered on hardened clay tablets in an organised manner, the Bronze Age equivalent of a postal service. There were letters written by kings and nobles, but also by merchants and everyday people, giving us a fascinating insight into life in this Bronze Age world. Letters that varied from people worried about relatives who had moved to the big city of Babylon, to angry complaints by customers about the quality of copper they had received. The stories preserved in these Bronze Age tablets are both memorable and relatable.

• 2:53Tristan Hughes?

  This is the story of the world's oldest letters, with our returning guest, Dr Amanda Podani. Amanda, it is such a pleasure to have you back on the podcast. It has been too long.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  It's such a pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

• 3:09Tristan Hughes?

  You're more than welcome, and I always love having you on because there's so many amazing stories from ancient Mesopotamia, and this is certainly the case today. I mean, Mesopotamia is home to the oldest letters that we know of.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  Yes, that's right. By a long way. I mean, well, that's not true. There are some early letters from Egypt, we just have thousands of them. So, a lot, a big corpus of texts to look at, yes.

• 3:32Tristan Hughes?

  How many thousands are we talking about?

• 3:33Speaker 02

  Well, for the period that we're going to talk about today, which is from 2000 to 1600 BCE or so, there are about 12,000 in Mesopotamia.

• 3:43Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  But there are many more if you count the ones that were found in Anatolia that were written by Mesopotamians, so thousands and thousands of them.

• 3:53Tristan Hughes?

  And what is so fascinating about these correspondences from that particular time, from that particular half millennium or so?

• 4:00Speaker 02

  What's really interesting is they'd been writing letters before. They'd had a writing system for twelve hundred years by, at this time. But most of the letters had been very much, at least the ones that have been found, very formal, often between kings, you know, there's a sort of sense of that this is just reflecting the world of the very elite people. And around two thousand or so, literacy becomes more common and people started writing letters who were not the sort of high elites, or even if they were elite people, they were writing about things that were sort of day-to-day concerns that reflected lots of other people's lives. And so we have this just incredible rich perspective of the, not quite the common people, but you know, getting much closer to the common people.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  And the other thing is that they wrote them in the first person. So the person would dictate the letter, but it was all in their own voice. And what I love about them is that whereas many documents from the ancient world are not in the first person, they're not writing, I did such and such, and I said to you, and that sort of thing. Whereas these are, and you sort of feel as though they're speaking across the centuries directly to us. And also, they were not thinking, I'm writing this for posterity, people in, you know, twenty twenty-five are going to be reading my letters. They were thinking, I just need to get this particular shipment sent, and the guy hasn't shown up, and I need to go, you know. That's, that was the tone of them.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  And so they're very immediate and they feel very real. And so they're really, really fun.

• 5:36Tristan Hughes?

  Do you think it's also quite reflective of us as a species that quite a few of these letters, including, I'm sure, a couple we're going to talk about, is one person complaining about another or moaning about something and writing it down?

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Yes. They didn't write unless they had a reason to write, because of course, it was much more complicated to send a letter than it is to send a text or an email. And so the process was so sort of convoluted, you had to actually physically get the letter to the person, and they didn't have a postal service. So. They tended to only write when there was not an emergency, but a real reason that they wanted to get in touch with someone. And those tended to be when they were either complaining about something, or they needed to explain something, or they had a request from somebody for, you know, for something, or that they were, you know, that had various concerns that they had to express. And sometimes if those concerns were very immediate, you get this

• 6:31Speaker 02

  sense of drop everything, do this now, I need it right away. Because the letter's going to take maybe days or weeks to get there. And so counting in that amount of time for the letter to arrive, you can imagine the urgency on the end of the person who was sending the letter, like, as soon as you get this, you need to do this, this and this, and get it back to me right away. So yeah, they do have a rather abrupt tone sometimes.

• 6:55Tristan Hughes?

  Yes. This is the Bronze Age equivalent of ASAP.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  Oh, yes.

• 6:59Tristan Hughes?

  Before, before we go into a few examples, Amanda, let's set the scene a bit more. First off, this time period, so 2000 to 1600 B.C. or BCE. What's happening in Mesopotamia at this time? I've got in my notes, the Old Babylonian period.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  Yes. Well, it's sort of two periods, because for the first 200 years or so, it was a time when there were a number of small kingdoms, and they shared Mesopotamia between them. And they were sometimes allied, they were sometimes at war with one another, but it hadn't sort of unified. And then you get the time of Hammurabi of Babylon, who, towards the end of his reign, actually, he came to the throne in 1792. But in the last 10 or so years of his long reign, 43 year reign, he united most of Mesopotamia, most of what is now Iraq, under his rule. And then for the 200 years after that, you sort of see the gradual decline of his, his large kingdom. But with Babylon being the, the central focus,

• 7:58Speaker 02

  the time that- The earlier time, you have two earlier cities that were more dominant. First, the city of Ism, and then the city of Larsa. And then Babylon took over and then took over both those regions and conquered all of what is now Iraq. So it was a time, starts out with quite a bit of warfare, becomes much more peaceful later. But then, again, you see wars break out as, as happened. But they weren't constant and they weren't affecting everyone all the time. For the most part, when you look at these letters, people aren't too much worried about war coming and destroying their city. It's, the wars were localized and, and not ubiquitous all the time.

• 8:36Tristan Hughes?

  Our first ever interview together was some three years ago now, about this time of year, wasn't it? And it was all about Hammurabi.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 8:42Tristan Hughes?

  So really nice that we can get back to this time period for our chat today. So Babylon's big at this time. Are there still other cities that are really big? Are the so-called like the Sumerian cities on the plain of Sumer, are they also still big at this time?

• 8:55Speaker 02

  This is actually the same region. So what had been Sumer in the earlier period is now this region that is southern Babylonia. It has different names at different times, but it's, it's the same place. And those cities that were important in Sumerian times continued to be important, like the city of Uruk, the city of Uruk, the city of Lagash. These were cities that continued to be important throughout this time period, even from the third millennium B.C. They had been important.

• 9:22Tristan Hughes?

  And so if literature becomes more, well, not literature, if language, written language becomes more widespread at this time in this area of the world, the big questions, what language are we talking about? And how do they write it down?

• 9:36Speaker 02

  Well, by this time, Sumerian was a dead language. That was the original language that the writing system seems to have developed for. They still wrote it, but they don't seem to have spoken it at home. The language that was spoken was Akkadian, which is a Semitic language. It's related to Hebrew and Arabic today. It's very well known, very well understood. And they used the cuneiform writing system to write Akkadian. And especially in the letters, you see that the letters from this time period are almost all in Akkadian. And they're, so again, they're in the language that they were speaking at home. Contracts might still be in Sumerian, literature might still be in Sumerian, but when you're writing a letter, it's in Akkadian.

• 10:15Tristan Hughes?

  Because everyone can understand that. And so a letter can go far and wide and people will still be able to understand what's written on it.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  Right, within, within the Mesopotamian basin, yes, that was the main, main language that was spoken. The other thing is they were writing on clay. Some people have the misapprehension that they wrote on stone. It wasn't stone, it was clay. And these tablets are that they wrote on are surprisingly small. So letters, the smallest letter I've seen is about the size of a postage stamp. And they've got tiny, tiny writing on it. The biggest one's about the size of an iPhone. So they're not big, they're, they're quite small.

• 10:45Tristan Hughes?

  So the size of a postage stamp. So I'm just, I'm just getting my mind around that right now. So that's.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  They're tiny.

• 10:51Tristan Hughes?

  Centimeters.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  Yes. And they were writing tiny, tiny script on it. So, but the average size really, it's the size of what you can put in the palm of your hand, which of course now is a, is a phone for us, but for them. And there are some funny pictures actually, where you've got a scribe holding a tablet and it looks as though he's holding a phone, because of the way we think.

• 11:10Tristan Hughes?

  The mobile phones of the Bronze Age. Well, there you go. Okay. Well, let's focus on a few examples. We have to start with the man, the one, the man, the myth, the legend of today. I'm going to butcher the pronunciation, but please, I, I hope you can arise. Is it Ia Nazir? Is that how we say it?

• 11:28Speaker 02

  Close, it's Ia and the second half of his name is Nazir. It's got a T sound to it because the S has a dot under it and that makes it Nazir.

• 11:37Tristan Hughes?

  Ia Nazir.

• 11:38Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 11:38Tristan Hughes?

  Ia Nazir. Okay. So who is this legend, Amanda? Why do we know of this figure? Why is he so internet famous today?

• 11:48Speaker 02

  Okay, well, let me tell you who he was first. He was a man who lived in Org, which was a city right in the southern part of Mesopotamia. His house was excavated by Leonard Woolley. And so when, this was ages ago, a century ago, when he was excavating the house, he found on the, on the floor of the house, a number of tablets that were scattered around, about, I think 26 of them. And these then were excavated and then they were they were published and they were sort of not particularly, nobody paid much attention to them. There were other houses with other tablets, but this particular house that belonged to Eonatzer, what was striking about

• 12:30Speaker 02

  him was that he was a trader, a sea trader. He went, he had boats that traveled all the way through the Gulf to what is now Bahrain, to Dillman, and he was particularly involved in the copper trade. So he's been known about for a very long time. In fact, I first encountered him when I was writing my book Brotherhood of Kings that we've talked about on your podcast before, because I was looking for someone that I could focus on who did sea trade and who was involved in this trade with Dillman. And it was, he was a lovely person. I had sort of, I don't know, maybe five pages in my book about him because he had all of these things that my book was about international relations and trade and diplomacy. And he

• 13:11Speaker 02

  was fascinating because he had this connection with Dillman. Now, this was before he was internet famous. I was ahead of the curve.

• 13:18Tristan Hughes?

  You beat the trend.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  I did. I did. But I did mention at the time that one of the striking things about these letters is that one of them was from a, someone who seemed to be a very disgruntled customer who was upset about the quality of the copper that he received. So anyway, couple of years went by, actually, five years went by after I published that book. And I started getting texts from friends and linked to, at that point, Twitter, saying, have you seen this trader, you know, this guy who's going viral? And I looked at him, I'm like, yeah, Eonatzer, my guy, right? But what had happened was, I think that the tablet was on display in the British Museum. I have no idea what, who, you know, how this started,

• 14:02Speaker 02

  but somebody saw the tablet and presumably found the translation, which is easily available. It's a 1967 book had published this tablet. And it got to be this thing about the first customer complaint, the first, you know, really angry customer. And when you read the letter, it does sound like someone just really annoyed when they're trying to get good quality in their, the product that they're buying, and they've been given, you know, bad copper. And it is still everywhere. I was talking to my husband about it yesterday, and we, he went online to look up, you know, well, who is this Aenatze? And you just, you find T-shirts and mugs and, you know, I mean,

• 14:41Speaker 02

  he is everywhere. So I think he would be absolutely blabbergasted to know that of all the people, people remember from his particular century, which is the 19th century B.C., that he was the one that has the biggest name today. It's as if, you know, you or I, four thousand years from now, suddenly became the most famous person and everybody knew your name. It's very odd. He's been featured in several, there was an article about him in Forbes magazine in 2018, which I think also kind of pushed the interest in him. I love it. I think it's really terrific, because what's so nice is that he is sort of a typical Mesopotamian person. And one of my goals in what I write is to get people away from

• 15:24Speaker 02

  only thinking about kings and wars and so forth, and looking at, at real people in real life. So I'm, I'm just thrilled that Aenatze has this new notoriety.

• 15:33Tristan Hughes?

  I do love, I've got one, I guess it's a meme in front of me at the moment. And we'll start off with this one just right now, but it's, ancient kings conquering lands and building monuments just to be remembered in history. And then there is Aenatze.

• 15:46Speaker 02

  Exactly right.

• 15:47Tristan Hughes?

  Which is, and there's an image of him as well on here. Normally, when there are Aenatze memes today, they also show this little figurine of a man with a big beard.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 15:57Tristan Hughes?

  What do we know about that? Is you're shaking your head when I say that?

• 15:59Speaker 02

  Completely unrelated. That sculpture is 900 to 1,000 years older than Aenatze.

• 16:05Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, God.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  So it would be like if you were sort of showing a picture of someone today, and you used an image of William the Conqueror.

• 16:11Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  It has nothing to do with him at all. It's completely the wrong era.

• 16:15Tristan Hughes?

  Okay, fair enough.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  There is no image of Aenatze, of course, because he was just an average person, and there was no way to get your sculpture done unless you were someone incredibly important. So, I mean, it's just Mesopotamian, but he doesn't wear the clothes Aenatze would have worn. He doesn't wear, doesn't look anything like him. So, no.

• 16:31Tristan Hughes?

  And can we just explore, I mean, what exactly this complaint is and who the main figures are in it?

• 16:37Speaker 02

  Yes, okay, this is actually fun because I've been doing some research on him for a project that I'm working on, a new book, and there's going to be an Aenazir chapter. So I'm delighted to get to talk about this. So the famous letter is one of only, it's one of 12 letters that were found in his house, but it is the longest and certainly the angriest. And it's written by a man named Nani. And Nani, he doesn't just appear in this letter, he appears in other documents from Aenazir's house. And he was someone who Aenazir regularly did business with and who was, I think, one of his investors. So he's, it's not where this is presented as an angry customer, he isn't exactly that. He's more an angry investor who seems to feel that he has, you know, he's really helped Aenazir out.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  And in here, Aenazir is not treating him well. He's also apparently the father of three other investors. So there are three other people who are named in Aenazir's archive, who are described as sons of Nani. So this is a family, and this was true in a lot of trading firms in the, in the ancient Near East, that they were often family based. And so we see Aenazir also worked with his own father, whose name shows up. And he worked with Nani and Nani's sons and a number of other trading families. So Nani is, is writing to him. And do you want me to read the letter?

• 17:54Tristan Hughes?

  Go on then, go on then.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  Okay, okay. This is the, this is the traditional translations coming from the Oppenheim. I will, I won't read the whole thing, but he says, "Tell Aenazir, Nani sends the following message. When you came, you said to me as follows. I will give Gimel Sinn when he comes fine quality copper ingots. You left them, but you did not do what you promised me. You put ingots which were not good before my messenger and said, if you want to take them, take them. If you do not want to take them, go away." I mean, so he's setting up this sort of like-

• 18:21Tristan Hughes?

  Take them or leave it, yeah.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. This is what supposedly Aenazir said. And then this is the part I think that people really love. "What do you take me for, that you treat somebody like me with such contempt? I have sent as messengers gentlemen like ourselves to collect the bag with my money deposited with you, but you have treated me with contempt by sending them back to me empty handed." Several times, and that through enemy territory. Actually, the word enemy is a little bit misleading here. It's really foreign territory, that enemy. Is there anyone among the merchants who trade with Dilman who has treated me in this way? You alone treat my messenger with contempt. And then there's a bit that I don't actually agree with the translation. It says, on account of one trifling mina of silver which I owe you. I don't think that's right, that there's a question mark in the translation, and I don't think he actually did owe him money.

• 19:06Speaker 02

  But anyway, he says, you feel free to speak in such a way. Well, I have given to the palace on your behalf, one thousand eighty pounds of copper. Of course, they didn't say pounds. They used a different, but that's been translated by the translator. And Shumi album has likewise given one thousand eighty pounds of copper. Apart from what we have both written on a sealed tablet to be kept in the Temple of Shamash. So stopping there for a minute. So this other guy, Shumi album, is also one of the investors that shows up in the flash. So these are people he knows well, right? And they have put copper into the Temple of Shamash under seal, you know, which is important. And then he says, how have you treated me for that copper? You have withheld my money bag from me in enemy, again, foreign territory. It is now up to you to restore my money to me in full.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  Take cognizance, then from now on, I will not accept here any copper from you that is not of fine quality. I shall, from now on, select and take the ingots individually in my own yard. And I shall exercise my right of rejection because you have treated me with contempt. I mean, it's just such a wonderful letter. He's so mad, right? You know, he's like, this is not how you treat me. I am a gentleman and I gentleman like us.

• 20:09Tristan Hughes?

  But he does keep it. He keeps it in his house, though, to be fair to him. He doesn't throw it away. It seems like maybe he did take it on board.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  No, this is such an interesting thing because six of these letters are complaint letters.

• 20:21Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, God. Oh, and that's it. Oh, dear.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  I know, right? So he's not just keeping this one. He has five others and he's keeping them. And I'm really puzzled about this because you would think you would just toss it, right? Don't want to deal with this. My wonder is if it isn't that he might have been trying to solve the problems and therefore he was keeping the letters. So that he was making sure that he did address their concerns. Within my field, Assyriology, there is a big debate. To whether Aonazir is actually a good merchant, just being maligned by his, his investors. Or whether he really was kind of a flake. And there are arguments on both sides. My sense is, we just don't have enough evidence. Because the problem is, you're right, he kept the letters.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  And that suggests that he was being conscientious and thinking, I need to do something about these. And therefore, I'll keep these letters and make sure that my fellow investors are, are assuaged. And another point is that people did tend to get a little bit hot under the collar when they wrote, if they were feeling like they needed their money fast. But the problem is, is that we don't have a comparable corpus of letters by a good copper merchant, because Aonazir's archive is the only one we have. So you can't really say, well, look at so and so down the street, who everyone was happy when they wrote to him and they got good copper and everything was good. He's it, right? He's our archive. And so there's the possibility that he was a good merchant and people just wrote that way. My sense is that if you've got six letters complaining,

• 21:52Speaker 02

  I don't think he was probably the world's most reliable person.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  There are other letters in other types of fields of trade and so forth. And they tend to be nicer than these ones. They tend to be more just straightforward, like, you know, they, they never said, thank you for what you've sent, because they just didn't really use the word thank you. But they would say, I've received the shipment and please send more. And I'm expecting your shipment in tomorrow or whatever. But the sort of level of annoyance that Nanny has is quite surprising. So I think perhaps he was, he had his moments. But interestingly, there's, and I've got the sort of summaries of some of the other letters, that several of the authors of the complaint letters say, send such and such so that so and so will not become upset.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  And so there's clearly a whole web of people involved. And I think there you have, there's the person who comes to pick up the copper. There's Aonazir providing the copper. There are the investors, there, there's someone who's going to be transporting it. There's someone who will be upset if it doesn't get to someone else. You know, those sorts of things. So it's, I think there's a vast amount of copper involved, which we know, because from the other documents in his house, there are, I can't remember the, the numbers, but thousands of kilograms of copper that he's responsible for, that are coming all the way from Dillman, all the way on this, on a boat. It's then being distributed in various ways. And you could see that if that starts collapsing as a system, if perhaps the copper isn't what people wanted,

• 23:25Speaker 02

  then they would have to, you know, go back to the guy who brought it to Aonatseer, but mentioning all these other people who are involved in the, in the transaction. So there's this, several of them, I think I've got four different letters where they say, act in such a way that it in sin does not get upset. Give him good copper so that I will not become upset. You know, there's this sort of theme that you need to get this right or someone's going to be upset about it. That I think it's a sign that if not that he was regularly messing up, at least they, they sort of worried about him doing so.

• 23:57Tristan Hughes?

  Worried about.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:58Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, poor man.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of the best one yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithGemini.

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• 25:42Tristan Hughes?

  I like that there are some scholars who are trying to defend Aenatze's

• 25:46Speaker 02

  Oh yeah.

• 25:47Tristan Hughes?

  reputation, but I'm afraid the internet has already cast judgment on him in the meme world. I mean, I'm gonna go through a few now and people can say some more in the comments. Please absolutely do. My favorite one is actually like from Pirates of the Caribbean one, I think, and it's the British commander, James Norington or someone like that. And he's in the original, he's talking to Captain Jack Sparrow when he's just been caught. He's caught the pirate and he says, you know, "You are without doubt the worst pirate I've ever seen." But in this one, they've replaced a pirate. It's he's, he's going, "You are without a doubt the worst Mesopotamian copper merchant I've ever heard of." And there's like that, that classic statue of Aenatzea and the other man said, "Ah, but you have heard of me."

• 26:32Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, there's so many more. There's the Lord of the Rings one, began with the forging of the great rings, given to the elves, immortal wisest fairies than all, seven to the dwarf lords, and nine were gifted to the race of men who above all else desire power. But they were all deceived as all the rings were made from really shitty copper. There's Aenatzea being sour on in Mount Doom.

• 26:53Speaker 02

  Oh, I love these. We just have to believe he was a bad copper merchant to keep this all going. I mean, it's so good.

• 26:59Tristan Hughes?

  Trump picks copper merchant Aenatzea as Secretary of State for metallurgy. Money doesn't matter. Rich people, looks don't matter. Attractive people, copper quality doesn't matter. Copper merchants, Aenatzea. Could go more. There's WhatsApp groups as well. People saying, "Give me it back." There's a copper colored Tesla and someone somehow Aenatzea has returned. And also people talking about if they could time travel, that the boys would go back and tell Nana, Nana, "Don't trust Aenatzea. He's gonna rip you off" kind of thing.

• 27:30Tristan Hughes?

  Okay, right, that's enough, but.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  Oh, that's fabulous. But you know, you know what I think resonates for people? Is it's just so human, right? I mean, we've all been there, right? We've been the person who's like, "I have at my wits end. I cannot get Target to take back this, whatever it is, you know, you're, you just like want to talk. Oh, you get the, the thing on the phone where you don't get a real human being and you're like, Larry, talk to someone." That sort of feeling comes through that letter. And I feel because, yeah, because it's 3,900 years ago. Two thousand eight hundred years ago, it's just so surprising, you know, that there is this very, very familiar kind of interaction between people. And yet, it's it's incomprehensibly long ago for a lot of people that and such a surprise.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  But of course, he's just one of so many thousands of people that we know so much about. It's so exciting that people care about him because there are so many more people they can care about as well that are equally human.

• 28:30Tristan Hughes?

  Exactly. You've hit the nail on the head there. We've started with Aya Natsir because it's a great story to get us rolling, but there are so many other stories that we can focus on and we will cover a few. But before we get into that, almost like a bit of a going away from the stories for a moment and talking more about, you know, the people who were carrying these letters, who were delivering them. Do we know much about what travel was like for these messengers who were carrying letters or goods at that time?

• 28:56Speaker 02

  I wish they'd written more themselves. We know about them because of what people write in the letters themselves. So they will talk about the letter that they're sending, or they'll talk about I'm sending a messenger with this letter. The people who carried them were all kinds of people. Some of the letters were carried by the scribe who wrote it. So they would, you know, write the letter and then take it themselves to where they were going. Sometimes they would give it to someone else and that person might or might not have been literate and they were just responsible for carrying it. There were even really important diplomats and envoys who had carried their own letters. But it wasn't a postal service. So it's not like you could sort of put it in the mailbox and somebody would pick it up and take it anonymously, stick your postage stamp. It was definitely a personal thing. So you would ask someone to take this message for you or you would take it yourself.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  And the really striking thing Tristan about this is that that was the only way to communicate long distance. We have become for the, you know, hundreds of years now, at least since the invention of the train, I guess. We've realized that things can be moved with without a person physically walking there, right? You can get a message and especially since the telegraph, you can get a message over a long distance almost instantly. We're so comfortable with that that it's hard to remember that it's really pretty recently that every single message you sent long distance physically had to be carried. And this is what I find so interesting, because this is first instance of that. This is when we have that beginning. And it continued, as I say, right up until steam trains, I guess,

• 30:23Speaker 02

  that somebody had to like take it in their hand and go off and and and carry the letter. And yet, everything went incredibly smoothly. I mean, Aenatsir notwithstanding. Um, in a way, though, it it even his letters showed just how smoothly things went. Because he was able to get the copper when he needed it in Dilman, and people were able to get it from him. And they were, they may have complained about the quality, but it was a working system. And it just astonishes me how much that depended on these people just walking from one place to another to get the message to where it needed to go. And their experiences, um, as I say, must have been really, really interesting. Because they were the ones who would be using the roads. They would be traveling on the rivers.

• 31:08Speaker 02

  They would be needing to be bilingual in some cases, depending on how far they were traveling. Aenatsir probably was bilingual. Whatever language they were speaking in Dilman, he would have had to know how to speak it. So there was a lot of interaction with with other regions away from home by a surprisingly large number of people. And then, of course, the messengers got this letter. They didn't have street addresses. So notoriously, Woolley gave Aenatsir a a street address. When he was excavating a door, he named the streets and gave them numbers. But those are not ancient. Those are just Woolley's creation. The streets were unnamed, the houses were unnumbered. So you were sent with a letter for Aenatsir in Ur. Go find him. You know, and so, and there are no maps.

• 31:52Speaker 02

  And so they didn't have a, a, you know, leveling, you know, GPS, which we're so dependent on now. But but even just a map showing where you were going. They would have a list of places that you would travel through. So that you had to go, you know, maybe first, if you were going from Babylon north, you'd go to Sipar. And after you went from Sipar, you'd go on to the next city. And so you knew which city to get to, one after another, to get to the place you were going. Got to that city, people would know how to get to the next city, you know, they would be able to give you directions. And then when you got to the city where you were delivering the letter, presumably you just said, where does Anatso live? And somebody would know and they would direct you there. But it's an experience that sounds very much as though it would be slow and complicated. And yet it seems to have worked really, really well.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  And it was what they did for centuries. That was just how you sent letters.

• 32:39Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, surely there must be a couple of examples or it must have happened where, you know, recipient no longer at a dress or something like that, you know, or like almost the equivalent of like new phone who dis at the same time, you know, where like, you know, it's sent to the wrong place or the wrong person and so on, because the person it was intended for has moved and they haven't let them know and stuff like that.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  Well, there are letters certainly where people, there's one I was working on recently, where a man writes to his partner, who was a business partner. And he said, basically, you sent the grain to the wrong location because I've moved, you know, and I've moved on, he's traveling. And some grain that was being sent to one place went to where he had been, not where he was now. And it was, or maybe it wasn't grain, it was some other shipment. So yes, things went to the wrong place because it took a long time. And if you've got, if you've sent a letter and it's travelled a couple of weeks to get to where your recipient is, and then the recipient has to send whatever goods you've asked for back to where you were. That's assuming a month later you're in the same place. You have no way of letting him know that you've moved. Right? Because by the time you've done so, the other shipment's already been sent.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  So yes, that kind of thing did happen. Things went to the wrong place. I think more striking are the letters that are sort of a little bit plaintive, where somebody will say, ever since you went to Babylon, I haven't heard from you. Would you please tell me how you are doing? I think if there was too long of a gap between letters, people started to worry. Are you okay? Have you had an accident? Did your boat sink? How do you know? So they would expect to get pretty regular correspondence to know that the person was still doing okay, was still alive. And for whatever reason, there's several of them about Babylon, people seem to go to Babylon and disappear. Just having a good time. Sorry, not not in touch.

• 34:24Tristan Hughes?

  Exactly, get carried away.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  But the other thing too is that if things were going fine, they didn't write letters. So we tend not to have the letters that would be the ones of like, having a nice time, wish you were here. They wouldn't send that.

• 34:35Tristan Hughes?

  We should go back to some more stories now. We've done Aenatzea, but I know that there are a couple more that are very close to your heart. So do you have some favorite letters that capture just how human these writers were?

• 34:47Speaker 02

  I do, I do. I have a number of them. One of them is one that was also in the Book of Letters from Mesopotamia, where Aenatzea's letter was first published. And I've used it for years and years and years with my students, because I think it's the one that for them resonates the most in terms of their own lives. And it's a letter by a young man. I mean, he's probably maybe in his late teens. And he wrote a letter to his mother. Now, this one is actually getting a little bit of internet traction too lately, I've noticed. But he writes to his mother and he says, "Tell the lady Xenu, Idin Sin sends the following message." And that sounds really formal. You know, we would say, "Dear mom." But this is just how everybody addressed their letters. So he's writing to his mother.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  And then he gives a little request for the gods to take care of her, which they did at the beginning of every letter. But then he goes, he says, "From year to year, the clothes of the young gentleman here become better, but you let my clothes get worse from year to year. Indeed, you persisted in making my clothes poorer and more scanty. At a time when in our house wool is used up like bread, you have made me poor clothes. The son of Adadidinam, whose father is only an assistant of my father, has two new sets of clothes, while you fuss about even a single set of clothes for me. In spite of the fact that you bore me and his mother adopted him, his mother loves him, while you, you do not love me." I just love that. It's just so good.

• 36:12Speaker 02

  He's just like, "I need better clothes and I am going to manipulate my mother into sending them by making her feel so guilty."

• 36:19Tristan Hughes?

  Oh my days. Yeah, I just typed it into Google search engine at the same time. I couldn't find any memes, but there is a Reddit page and it just says, "Spoiled brat from ancient Babylon writes to his mom complaining that she doesn't buy him enough fancy clothes."

• 36:31Speaker 02

  Exactly. But he's not buying them. She's making them, right?

• 36:35Tristan Hughes?

  Making them, exactly.

• 36:35Speaker 02

  So the maiden of the household, well, she probably had weavers who worked for her. His dad, we know a lot more about him than that letter suggests. His father was a man named Shamash Hazir, who was- Was a high official for Hammurabi. And Shamash Hazir's archive has been found, and this letter was in that archive. So it was among his personal documents, but they, he also has his business documents. And his wife was Zinu, and she ran the household when her husband was away. And clearly, at this point, the son is away, maybe he's doing some kind of service for the state or something like that. But he's definitely concerned that he needs to look the part, you know, his dad is Shamash Hazir. He needs to look like he's someone important and his clothes are not up to it.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  And but the the sort of like, you do not love me at the end. Oh, my goodness, that's that's classic. But again, this, we don't know much about it in Sin, that is his only letter, but we know a lot about his family. And you can see the context in which this letter was written. And some really striking things come out from it, which is that the number of sets of clothes he has. He says he only has a single set of clothes. That's not that unusual, because fabric was so expensive and time consuming to make. You couldn't just go and buy your clothes at the local store. You had them made at home by weavers or by your mother. If it was a poorer family, she would weave at the family's clothing. And interestingly, people were very much identified with their clothes.

• 38:00Speaker 02

  So that if you wanted to sign something in ancient Mesopotamia, you would seal it with your cylinder seal. But some people didn't have a cylinder seal. And the, if you were poor, you wouldn't have one. And so you would put that a a an impression of the hem of your garment in place of a cylinder seal. And that would be considered to be so closely related to you, so much a part of you. That that was as much of a a sort of assertion of your willingness to do whatever the contract said or to abide by it, that it counted in place of a cylinder seal.

• 38:33Tristan Hughes?

  I think completely. I think sometimes in the world that we live in, post industrial age, you know, where we could just go down to the shops and buy clothes and it's very easy. We forget about how back then people made clothes at home. And it was such a big task and it was, you know, not, it was usually associated with the the mother or the women, wasn't it? Household.

• 38:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 38:56Tristan Hughes?

  And this is once again, this is letter, it shines a light on that, you know, something that you'll see across cultures. I think there's a Vindalanda letter as well about a soldier asking for socks. I don't know if it's to his mum or not, but it once again, it's a similar thing, isn't it? It's the requesting of clothing from someone that they know. And in this case, it's from this young adult, high ranking adult to his mum.

• 39:18Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. I have another letter, may I?

• 39:21Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, absolutely. Let's go on to the next one.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  Okay, okay. So this one is another one that is about children, but this is about a very, very small child. So the letter is written by a man who was the secretary of a king and king was named Zimri Lim. He was the king of Mari. And so he says, say to my lord, thus says, shu nu chahalu, your servant. Concerning the infant Yarim Lim. Now, the Lim part of his name suggests he might be a member of the royal family, but he's an infant, this infant Yarim Lim, about whom my lord has written to me. I spoke to Hammurabi, now this is not Hammurabi of Babylon, this is another Hammurabi. Hammurabi said to me, winter is arriving. How could this child travel? Come now, if this child goes along with the horses, the oxen and whatever gifts I would convey to my brother Zimri Lim,

• 40:08Speaker 02

  that accompany the youngster with all the muck and cold, how could he go? He simply cannot travel. He suckles now. He is still a baby, not yet weaned. The child is just two months old. He must be weaned first. Until better times, it would not be good to transport him. This is what Hammurabi replied to me. So I love this one because you have this baby, right? It's winter time. They think the baby needs to travel to Mari. And this guy Hammurabi, whoever this Hammurabi is, is going, this is not a smart idea. You do not put a baby on a wagon with a bunch of muck and assume he's going to make it safely in the winter time to the palace. It's just such a common sense sort of thing. But it evokes such an interesting moment where Zimri Lim has simply said, bring the baby.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  And he's like, hold on, think about that.

• 40:55Tristan Hughes?

  That'd be silly, yeah.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  That's going to be a bit of a, bit of a challenge. There's a lot of things that the baby needs. And one of them is probably a two months old, not being put in a wagon with a bunch of gifts.

• 41:13Speaker 04

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• 42:30Tristan Hughes?

  Do you think it also shines a light on the king perhaps being a bit, well, ignorant towards how to look after a baby? And then his daughter also showing how she can talk to her dad, even though, you know, he's the king, to say, "Actually, I think you need to think about this again. I don't think you quite understand how babies work."

• 42:50Speaker 02

  Exactly. Actually, this is a man who's writing it.

• 42:52Tristan Hughes?

  It's a man, sorry.

• 42:53Speaker 02

  The secretary, no, he's a man. But there are several things about moving babies around. And one of the things they always say is the baby needs to be with his mother or his nurse or her nurse. Then you cannot just put a baby somewhere and assume the baby's going to be fine. So yes, I think Simrely might have been a little bit out of touch with what the needs of babies might be. Yeah.

• 43:14Tristan Hughes?

  Well, I believe you've probably got another letter for us, don't you, Amanda?

• 43:18Speaker 02

  I don't have it to read, but there is, um, I can tell you, because it's a whole correspondence.

• 43:22Tristan Hughes?

  Go on.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  But a series of letters that, again, Zimri Lim, in this case, it's his daughter. And his daughter was named Kurum. He had a number of daughters. I think he had eleven. And he married them off to various local kings and officials. Because diplomatic marriage was an important way of keeping the kingdom united. And so there was a king named Hyasumu. And Hyasumu was a very difficult vassal of Zimri Lim's. He was someone who tended to fly off the handle. He was someone who was erratic. He would make an allegiance, an alliance with someone or also pledge allegiance to one king. And then he would turn around and switch his allegiance. And so Zimri Lim had already married one of his daughters to Hyasumu.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  And that had worked well for her, but she got along well with her husband, which means that she actually turned on her father. So that was not good for him. He was even accusing her of witchcraft and things. So first order went off, became a bit of a problem. Second daughter, Kurum, is sent off to marry Hyasumu. And we have a series of letters from the daughter, and it's, it's less common to get letters from women. You know, they, most of the letters are from men, not all of them, though. And this daughter, Kurum, sent what must have been very confidential letters. Because she managed to get them out of the kingdom where she was staying and back to her dad, because they were found in his palace. And they get increasingly nervous and anxious to come home.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  She is initially not allowed her maids, they're taken away. And then she starts complaining that Hyasumu is being dismissive of her and that he's going to be, and he starts threatening her. And so these, actually, it's quite concerning. I mean, the others have been a bit flippant. But these ones, I think, really kind of shine a spotlight on a woman who is genuinely afraid for her safety. But the very sweet thing about them is how much she trusts her dad to rescue her. That he, and he, there are letters from him showing that he was indeed trying to rescue her. That she asked for chariot to be sent to pick her up so that she can get back home. And she, at one point. She's so desperate, she says, you know, send it, or I'm gonna throw myself off the roof. I mean, she is really terrified.

• 45:37Speaker 02

  And the really sad thing about this correspondence is you're reading it and you're going, what's gonna happen to her next? Is she gonna be okay? And then we don't hear. There's like silence.

• 45:46Tristan Hughes?

  No other letters, so we have no.

• 45:47Speaker 02

  No other letters.

• 45:48Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  But I think that's a good sign. I think had something happened, we would have had letters, you know, Hiram's been killed by Hyasumu and they, obviously Zimri Lim at that point would have gone to war against his vassal because he wouldn't have accepted that. So the very fact that there's silence, I think means she was probably okay. And once she's back at the palace, nobody needs to write anything, right? Because she's there, we're done. So that's the way I see it. I think that although there was this very stressful moment in her life, that probably it was resolved. And once you live in the same city, you don't have to write letters. You know, she at that point had been back at the same palace with her father. But the sort of care for her that he reflects in his attempts to to rescue her is really touching. And her description of her relationship with her sister, which was very fraught,

• 46:33Speaker 02

  that's that's interesting, too. There's there's all of these dynamics that you don't think about. When you just hear, oh, there was a diplomatic marriage.

• 46:40Tristan Hughes?

  Yes.

• 46:40Speaker 02

  You know? Whereas if the if the relationship between the two kings wasn't good, the relationship between the vassal king and his wife could be bad. All sorts of of fascinating aspects like that. And so that's a example.

• 46:54Tristan Hughes?

  Completely, in so many of these ancient societies, you know, the diplomatic marriages where we usually make it quite clear that, you know, the princesses are effectively just pawns. And they're given to X, Y and Z to secure a political agreement or, you know, secure borders and so on. But at least with this letter, they become a bit more than that. And actually, you see the human side behind it. And actually, the fact that hopefully, in this case, and we don't know for sure, but the king actually saw that his daughter, his beloved daughter, was in trouble and got her back home and, you know, away from this marriage, which is just nice compared to that.

• 47:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, and interestingly, they weren't, although, yes, the marriages were set up as though they were just pawns in a chess game. But once they got there, and this was true of another of Simran Lim's daughters, they kind of become spies for their dad. And they, they're living in the court and they would write these letters, which are surprisingly frank about what's going on in their husband's court. Which means that they had messengers who were coming from the father, taking messages back to the father without the husband apparently seeing them. Because it doesn't seem as though he'd necessarily okayed the message. And so they become very much, almost like a resident ambassador in the court of the person that they've married, but still have this close time with their father. And so you see that for hundreds of years, that that seems to have been a continuing relationship.

• 48:11Speaker 02

  So they're not powerless at all. These are women who, they're powerless over who they marry. Yes, they're, they're sent to marry a person. But once they're there, they become some of the most important people in their father's foreign policy, which I find very interesting.

• 48:25Tristan Hughes?

  Very, very interesting indeed. Okay, well, let's look at one more example because it's here in my notes. And it includes the well-known Egyptian pharaoh, who we've, I think we've also briefly covered when we did the Bronze Age Brotherhood of Kings. Akhenaten, he liked a good letter, didn't he?

• 48:42Speaker 02

  He did. Oh, my goodness, yes. I actually mentioned that because of this issue of the bad copper, because Akhenaten was notorious for not sending the gifts that he had promised. And so whereas in Aonatia's case, it was that his copper was supposedly bad, probably not refined enough or something. In Akhenaten's case, he sometimes just didn't send things. And then when he did, he was accused by the kings he sent them to, often of not sending what he'd promised. So there's an example where he had promised to send some gold and he sent it to Babylon and the Babylonian king writes back and he said, I know you sent this gold sort of in good faith,

• 49:25Speaker 02

  and it must be just because someone other than you sealed the bag. But when I put this gold in the kiln, nothing came out. Meaning that, he doesn't mean nothing, he means there was very little gold. That it was perhaps alloyed with something else, or perhaps it was gold-plated bricks, so who knows? But it was not the solid gold that Akhenaten had promised. And so there, he's giving Akhenaten an out. He's saying, "Wasn't your fault. Next time, just make sure you check the gold, not your, quote, "trustworthy official who was ripping me off." But then another king was waiting and waiting and waiting for statues of solid gold that were promised to him. And Akhenaten finally sent him statues, which were wooden with gold leaf on them. And again, he was sort of,

• 50:09Speaker 02

  "Why would you send me these gold-leafed statues when you promised me solid gold?" And that same tone of, you know, Nani's tone in his letter to Aenatsir, of like, "I wanted something and you sent me something different." But the difference with the kings is that, whereas Nani takes this very sort of imperious tone with Aenatsir, I think he's probably seeing himself as the superior partner and he's berating Aenatsir. The kings couldn't do that. They had to always be polite to each other and always maintain this sort of pretense of, "You would never have meant to do this, I realize, and I'm sure the gold statues are still on their way."

• 50:48Tristan Hughes?

  It's rather relatable today, isn't it? Maybe not the kings bit, but almost like sending an email to someone. If you've sent them an email but they haven't replied yet, and you're just like, "Oh, I'm sure you're just really, really busy and this has got lost in the ether. But reply to this now," kind of thing. So as you say, as you brilliantly surmised, it gives them an out at the start, but it also underlines you want something done about it.

• 51:11Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah. And it's interesting because the letters are mostly very civil and very polite. They find ways of, sort of in a passive-aggressive way, of saying what they want to say. But there are a few letters where they break that sort of fourth wall and they come out and say, "We aren't supposed to say this." But we just have to say, you just need to pay us back, you know, and, and, and it says, there's, there's a letter that says, we are having to do what gentlemen don't do, which is to be blunt, you know, we are going to have to say this. And that I think is very telling. There's, there's one last letter. I've got so many of them, but there's one, this was in Brotherhood of Kings, actually, where a king of, of Katnax was writing to the king of Akallitim.

• 51:54Speaker 02

  And he says exactly that. He says, I'm going to have to say what is never said, which is that you sent me a gift that wasn't very good. And it wasn't worth what I, you know, I gave you really beautiful, I gave you horses, I gave these amazing horses and you sent me back some tin. Tin is not worth, you know, what the horses are worth. And so he's saying what is supposedly unsaid, you know, like it's supposed to be, we're supposed to be good to each other. We're supposed to do the right thing and you didn't do the right thing.

• 52:21Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah. What did I send you? I sent you gold. You sent me poor quality copper by this guy called Aenatse. What the hell are you doing? Imagine if you found that, that would be quite something.

• 52:31Speaker 02

  That would be good. Yes.

• 52:33Tristan Hughes?

  Amanda, this has been such a fun chat and the things I'm taking away from it, I mean, one, Aenatse, the judgment is still out despite the mean world having already decided. Two, like how relatable these letters are to us today, which just is so lovely to get that insight, even, even the kings, but, but obviously more focusing on the people beneath. And three, I guess, how efficient communication was in this Bronze Age world, how interconnected this world was, and letters is a great way to see that.

• 53:04Speaker 02

  It's really true. I, I was, um, I'm more and more struck by this, the more letters that I'm reading from my research. That it was a system that worked really, really well and that there were a lot of people involved in it. And a lot of understood connections. And I think a lot of it was that they had these networks of people that they worked with. And that they knew and that would then help them to find someone in another town that they could work with there. It was all very, very much about human connection and about these unwritten rules of civility and of, um, getting things done fast, you know, making sure that.

• 53:41Speaker 02

  A letter was replied to that a shipment of something was sent when you would say that you were going to send it, because, as unlike today, we can't, they couldn't just text and say, hey, it hasn't arrived yet. You had this such a long process to get the materials. And there was no real way to check up on it, except to trust that the people were going to follow through. And there is a lot of trust in their system. And a lot of what seemed to be actually really sort of hardworking conscientious people who were not always nasty to each other. I think that's the one thing that perhaps Aenazia has given a slightly misapprehension about, which is the sort of the sense that were they all this rude to each other? No, no, that's not the case.

• 54:25Tristan Hughes?

  Last but certainly not least, the least we can do is have you mention the books that you have written on this topic in the past, which cover this amazing Bronze Age world?

• 54:37Speaker 02

  The one that I mentioned, Brotherhood of Kings, which came out in 2010, that one is about diplomacy, but it's also a lot about trade. And again, that was where Aenazia made his first currency, in my life, anyway. Then I did a book called The Ancient Near East, a very short introduction, which my books tend to be long, that one is not long, that one is very short. Then the most recent one is Weavers, Scribes and Kings, A New History of the Ancient Near East. That's the one.

• 55:01Tristan Hughes?

  Which is much bigger, which is a very, very chunky book, but a very, very highly received. It is, it's everything you need to know about the ancient Near East, from kings to everyday people. It's brilliant.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  Lots of everyday people. I mean, that's one of the things I was really trying with that book, was to get more of the stories of the kinds of things we've been talking about, the people, the weavers and the scribes, not just the kings, and their lives. And a lot of that book is based on letters, actually. The, one of my favorite primary sources for working to understand people's lives in that whole 3,000 years of history that are covered in that book is the letters.

• 55:34Tristan Hughes?

  The interest in Mesopotamia has rocketed. And I don't know how you found it in the academic sphere over the past years. Have you seen firsthand this interest of Mesopotamia go to another level? Because I feel I have from the outside.

• 55:48Speaker 02

  It's nice to hear that you're feeling it too. I'm never sure if I'm hearing from people just because they've read my book, one of my books, or if it's a wider phenomenon. But I would love to think so, because the thing is, it's 3,000 years of history. I mean, it is so much history. It's so rich, and we have so much documentation. And we have documentation of a kind that one really doesn't have for almost any other ancient culture. These documents that were not meant to survive, they're not all literary, they're not all royal inscriptions, there's enormous, I mean, the vast majority of the materials that survived were not intended to. And that means that we can look at aspects of social history and economic history that are so difficult for most of the ancient world.

• 56:29Speaker 02

  And, and it's such a vibrant civilization, it's so full of interesting people. So I hope you're right, I really do. I think that's deserved because it is just such a rich source of information for what is really the beginning of people living in cities. And I think people have often a sense, my students, when they come to class for the first time, they think, oh, this is so long ago, they must have all just been killing each other all the time and they didn't have any laws and they just behaved that way.

• 56:54Tristan Hughes?

  They're all primitive, yes.

• 56:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, that, that sort of, yes, image. And not true at all. Right from the very first cities, people were finding ways that they could live peacefully with each other and they had these big social networks and, and they were close to their families. They were good people. Obviously, there were some seriously bad kings and there was some brutality that we, you know, that happened. But when you look at the scale of the average person, you do really see that they weren't arbitrarily violent or anything like that at all.

• 57:25Tristan Hughes?

  Amanda, this has been such a wonderful chat. As always, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast today.

• 57:31Speaker 02

  Thank you very much for having me. I really enjoyed it.

• 57:37Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Dr. Amanda Podani returning to the show to talk through the amazing story of the world's first letters, the oldest letters some 4,000 years ago. I hope you enjoyed this episode just as much as I did recording it. It's wonderful to cover the story of Eonat Zia and so many others. So yes, hope to see more Eonat Zia memes in the future and hopefully you can hearken back to his career in some funny comments too for this episode. We'll be keeping an eye out for those. So get thinking. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, well, we'd really appreciate

• 58:22Tristan Hughes?

  that. And not a bad rating like Eonat Zia, okay? Don't forget, you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. Sign up at www/historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 58:37Tristan Hughes?

  That's all from me. I'll see you in the next episode.

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