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OGistorian t1_itwt1nn wrote

As daughter of Sargon the Great, she was probably one of the most learned people on the planet during her life.

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NtheLegend t1_itx1lzk wrote

I’m sure the copper she received was superior.

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Royal_Bumblebee_ t1_itymw2k wrote

do you think she has Wilson's Disease?

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RiceAlicorn t1_itysv0m wrote

No, they're making a joke reference to Ea Nasir. He was a Mesopotamia merchant who was notoriously the recipient of the oldest known complaint letter in history — a customer sent him a clay cuneiform tablet complaining that Ea Nasir had sold him shitty copper.

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sostias t1_ityuci4 wrote

That's not even the best part. The tablet about the copper was one of many tablets found in what is believed to be Ea-Nasir's home, and the other tablets were complaint letters as well. The fact that we have these clay tablets means that they were fired. While the tablets could have been fired during a residential fire, I'd like to believe that Ea-Nasir was a sleezey merchant who kept his hate mail and loved it enough to fire it and laugh about it forever.

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Bentresh t1_itzhes7 wrote

To add to this, we have tens of thousands of letters from the houses of Assyrian and Babylonian merchants from Ea-Nasir’s era, some of them predating him by a century or two. Quite a few letters include complaints about shabby treatment (e.g. that a correspondent writes terribly short and unsatisfactory letters) or reference shady business activities like smuggling goods past customs checkpoints — a practice that got some unlucky merchants sent to jail.

While Ea-Nasir’s letters are an early example of “customer service” complaints, his business activities and tablet storage were by no means unusual.

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StrategicBean t1_iu16wt9 wrote

Crazy to think they had "customs checkpoints" back then

I wonder if they had protectionist tariffs too

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Bentresh t1_iu23le6 wrote

They did take some protectionist measures with regard to long distance trade. I'll quote a couple of relevant sections of Klaas Veenhof's Mesopotamia: The Old Assyrian Period.

>The quantitative relation between the expensive "Akkadian textiles", imported from the south, and the institutional or domestic textile production in Assur... is still not clear, but the importance of the textile trade for Assur is underlined by evidence for clearly protectionist measures of the City Assembly, contained in the letters VS 26, 9 and AKT 3, 73:9ff., studied in Veenhof 2003d, 89ff. The first forbids trade in specific types of Anatolian textiles and the second probably obliges traders to buy more textiles, by limiting the quantity of tin that could be bought with the silver arriving from Assur.

p. 83

>But import of textiles and presumably copper from the south apparently did not prevent considering "Akkadians'' as rivals in the trade. This is implied by the just mentioned prohibition of selling gold to them and confirmed by a surprising stipulation in the draft of a treaty with a ruler in southern Anatolia, probably somewhere in the area of the great western bend of the Euphrates, near Hahhum. He has to promise that he will extradite Akkadians, presumably Babylonian traders who travelled north via the Euphrates and came to his country, to be killed by the Assyrians. But alongside such protectionism also good relations were necessary with cities and lands whose cooperation was essential for the trade and the safety of the caravans.

p. 98

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TheMadTemplar t1_ityulvz wrote

So the 3rd millennium BCE version of a hip shop posting bad reviews to be funny.

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[deleted] t1_itwtzmr wrote

[removed]

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lashawn3001 t1_ityegwd wrote

"The compiler of the tablet (is) Enheduanna. My lord, that which has been created (here) no one has created before."

The first copyright.

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Oksamis t1_itx1jtf wrote

Can you imagine how difficult it must’ve been to be an author without a name?

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surgeon_michael t1_itxm8po wrote

They probably rode through the desert on a horse…too

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mickeyslim t1_itxptyw wrote

Wait... It's the song saying, "I rode through the desert (on a horse) with no name," as in, the speaker has no name??? I always assumed the horse itself was nameless.

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scavengercat t1_itxrmev wrote

The song is called "A Horse With No Name" so I'd bet it's safe to assume the horse was indeed nameless. And Dewey Bunnell, the guy who wrote the song, was quoted as saying about his horseback trip into the desert to shoot an album cover photo, "We had fun, but I don’t recall the name of the horse I rode while I was out there". All signs point to a horse that was just "horse".

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mazurzapt t1_ity6s4e wrote

I loved that song. A friend asked me, “What does it mean though?” I didn’t even try to explain, you just enjoy it for what it is.

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DairyNurse t1_itzsog9 wrote

I honestly always thought it was referencing a sex-drought because it came out during the second sexual revolution.

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FunnySynthesis t1_itxro1r wrote

It is the horse with no name, but you got the joke so it doesn’t matter.

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Top-Pension-564 t1_itx7evz wrote

Is that an alternate spelling of Anhedonia?

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FunconVenntional t1_itxfg4g wrote

Anhedonia is a term coined in 1896 by psychologist Théodule-Armand Ribot to describe the reduced ability to experience pleasure.

It comes from the Greek word hēdonē meaning “pleasure” with the prefix an for “without”.

So any similarity in pronunciation appears to be coincidental.

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mmikhailidi t1_ityxto6 wrote

  • Gimme a word, any word, and I tell you how it's Greek.
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GenFatAss t1_itzi0zw wrote

Well I can't pass that one up I'll would like to see what you can do with this word. "teriyaki"

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mmikhailidi t1_itzjfra wrote

Teri comes from Terra, means Earth, or the world

Yaki comes from γιατί means "why". So "why in a world you like this if there are roasted goat with herbs and garlic!" There you go!!

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Jtoa3 t1_iu08nly wrote

All jokes aside, I did try to see if there was a relation. I didn't do it for both parts of the word, too much work, but it's unlikely teriyaki is related to greek in any meaningful way. the suffix Yaki can ultimately be traced to Proto-Austronese, like many southeast asian languages. This is a seperate language family from Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor language of Greek and many other languages. these groups may share a common language ancestor, but may also not. Language developed hundreds of thousands of years before the earliest reconstructed proto languages, so we simply don't know if they developed in parallel in totally disparate cultures, or if they both developed from a shared language that has been lost to time.

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Turridan t1_iu0awdi wrote

Shame that she didn't also use the world's first pen name. I'm trying to pin down exactly how to pronounce her name. Difficult.

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Bentresh t1_iu0eeij wrote

Inn-head-oo-on-(n)ah is the best way I can describe how her name is pronounced.

To break down her name:

  • en (“priestess”)

  • hedu (“ornament”)

  • an (“sky/heaven”)

  • a(k) (Sumerian genitive, translated as “of”)

Lady/priestess, the ornament of heaven

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lordmagellan t1_iu0hp46 wrote

Do you have a source you're using for this? I like seeing the components that make up names this way.

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Bentresh t1_iu0m6rn wrote

Just my own translation. I’m an ancient Near Eastern historian who had to take Sumerian in grad school, although I specialize in the Late Bronze Age.

I’m not sure if there’s any prosopographical works for the Akkadian and Ur III periods, but here’s a few resources for names from later periods you may find interesting.

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lordmagellan t1_iu0pxff wrote

Awesome. Thanks for the links. I'm just a layman whose mind is constantly imagining stories. The more I learn about this period just feeds the imagination.

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[deleted] t1_itx2z2l wrote

[removed]

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HelpVerizonSwitch t1_itxbxpr wrote

Pretty contrived accolade to attribute to someone. She obviously was not “the world’s first author” in any sense, just the author of the earliest directly attributed work.

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garden_peeman t1_itxwh0d wrote

The title was pretty clear to me; it's the first named author (emphasis to show how I read it), I don't know how they could have made it clearer.

It was an interesting read regardless.

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mazurzapt t1_ity719m wrote

I would really like to see the exhibit. I think it’s so interesting - and I just happen to be reading Andrew George’s translation of Gilgamesh, now.

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Bentresh t1_itxdswn wrote

Additionally, it's important to draw a distinction between works attributed to Enheduanna and the works that were actually composed by Enheduanna. Most of the works attributed to Enheduanna were in fact created in the Old Babylonian period, several hundred years after the collapse of the Akkadian empire.

>For the Sumerian corpus, the tradition gives us the names of two alleged authors: Enheduanna and Lu-Inanna (Michałowski 1996: 183–86). Enheduanna was the daughter of Sargon, the king of Akkad, as well as a priestess of the Moon-god Nanna at Ur. Up to six compositions are attributed to her: a long hymn to Inanna known as The Exaltation of Inanna or Ninmešarra (nin me šar2-ra “lady of all the me’s/divine powers”; Zgoll 1997); Inanna hymn C or Inninšagurra (in-nin ša3-gur4-ra “lady with a great heart”; Sjöberg 1975a); the narrative known as Inanna and Ebih (Attinger 1998); the collection of Temple Hymns (Sjöberg and Bergmann 1969); a balbale song of Nanna; and an Ur III tablet mentioning Nanna-Suen and Enheduanna (Goodnick Westenholz 1989).

>However, the main composition attributed to her that includes some possibly autobiographical data (Ninmešarra) was most likely composed several centuries after Enheduanna’s death, in the Old Babylonian period (Civil 1980: 229). Aside from the aforementioned Ur III text, no composition traditionally attributed to her appears in a single tablet that could be dated prior to 1800 (Veldhuis 2003: 31 n. 2). In fact, there can be little doubt that Enheduanna started to be regarded as an author only in a tradition that begins centuries after her death: This is a case of traditional authorship, not historical. The other supposed author is Lu-Inanna, “chief leatherworker (ašgab gal) of Enlil,” who according to the composition itself would have dictated the Tummal Chronicle to a scribe (Sollberger 1962; Oelsner 2003). However, this composition is not the historical document that it purports to be but rather a scribal artifact. Thus, the attribution of its authorship to a leatherworker is an ironic device within an erudite exercise in fake royal legitimation...

"Sumerian Literature" by Gonzalo Rubio in From an Antique Land: An Introduction to Ancient Near Eastern Literature edited by Carl Ehrlich

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HeyCarpy t1_itzgao8 wrote

> “the world’s first author”

Quotations, how do they work

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Ripcord t1_ityq1wp wrote

The author of the earliest directly attributed work...that we know about, too.

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