Paperwork stories
The world's oldest customer complaint is almost 4,000 years old
Bad copper. An angry customer. Same problem, different millennium.
2 min read
Around 1750 BCE, a man called Nanni had had enough. A copper merchant named Ea-nasir had supplied copper that Nanni considered unacceptable, and the whole transaction had apparently become unpleasant enough to deserve a formal complaint.
So Nanni wrote a complaint.
Not an email. Not a support ticket. Not a one-star review.
A clay tablet.
The message was written in cuneiform and sent to Ea-nasir. Nanni complained about the quality of the copper, about delays and about how his representative had been treated.
Customer service was already complicated in the Bronze Age.
The surviving tablet shows that arguments over quality, delivery and service are much older than online shopping.
The details belong to a very different world, but the structure feels surprisingly familiar: a buyer expected one thing, received another and wanted the seller to put it right.
The complaint survived. The copper did not.
The tablet was excavated at the ancient city of Ur and is now part of the British Museum collection.
It measures only about 11.6 by 5 centimetres — roughly the size of something you could hold easily in one hand.
Guinness World Records recognises it as the oldest known written customer complaint.
And paperwork is even older.
Cuneiform writing emerged in Mesopotamia more than a thousand years before Nanni's complaint.
Some of the earliest known writing was used for bookkeeping — recording things such as food and rations.
Humanity invented writing and very quickly discovered administration.
Some things really do not change.
Nearly four thousand years later, people still receive documents that are confusing, annoying, important or all three at once. The good news is that you no longer need to read cuneiform.
Ksonia can help with the modern paperwork.
Scan or import a document and Ksonia helps explain what it says, what matters and what you may need to do next.
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