Nanni complained about bad copper 3,750 years ago

2026. The British Museum holds a clay tablet the size of a hand, written on both faces in cuneiform, the wedge script of Mesopotamia. It is the complaint of a customer named Nanni, furious because he had been sold poor-quality copper 3,750 years ago: the oldest surviving written consumer complaint.

The 1930s. A dig at Ur, a city in the south of present-day Iraq, pulls a pile of filed tablets out of a private house. The owner was called Ea-nasir and he traded in copper brought up the Persian Gulf. Among the things he kept there are several letters from angry customers. He kept every one of them.

Around 1750 BC. Nanni sends a messenger with silver to buy ingots. He is given metal worse than agreed and, on top of that, they treat the man badly, after he has crossed enemy territory to get there. Nanni dictates to a scribe a letter that would fit whole into any complaints thread today: he will not take that copper, he wants his silver back, and he warns that from now on he will pick the ingots one by one and in person.

We do not know whether he was paid. We do know that Ea-nasir took that letter home and kept it with the others for the rest of his life, and that of the whole copper business the only thing that has reached us is the file of the customers he left unhappy.