Moshenska, Gabriel;
(2026)
The Legend of Ea-Naṣir" How a Babylonian Businessman Became an Internet Meme.
Journal of Contemporary Archaeology
, 12
(1)
pp. 52-76.
10.1558/jca.30204.
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Abstract
The “complaint tablet to Ea-Naṣir” was discovered during Leonard Woolley’s excavations at Ur in the 1920s, and is currently on display in the British Museum. The tablet, with its cuneiform inscription, dated to ca. 1750 BC, is an excoriating attack on Ea-Naṣir’s fraudulent business practices, and has become known as the world’s oldest customer complaint. In 2015 the complaint tablet was the subject of popular viral social media posts on Reddit and tumblr, followed by a surge of international news coverage. Since then the complaint tablet has become a popular and unusually-long-lasting internet meme. Ea-Naṣir, his poor-quality copper ingots and other elements from the inscribed narrative have been creatively combined with images and references to popular culture, current affairs and established meme formats. In this paper I explore the emergence, development and endurance of the Ea-Naṣir meme, based on a corpus of images, texts and related commentary collected from digital media. My analysis, grounded in a framework for studying the dynamics of memetic processes, argues that the meme serves primarily as an “in-joke” for online communities, while Ea-Naṣir himself has been transformed into an archetypal “trickster” figure. While focused on a specific case study, the methods and framework offer a starting point for future research on internet memes in digital folklore, reception studies and allied fields.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Legend of Ea-Naṣir" How a Babylonian Businessman Became an Internet Meme |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1558/jca.30204 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.30204 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the author accepted manuscript. It has been made open access under the Creative Commons (CC BY) licence under the terms of the UCL Intellectual Property (IP) Policy and UCL Publications Policy. |
| Keywords: | Copper ingots, digital heritage, folklore, memetics, public archaeology, reception studies |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Institute of Archaeology UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Institute of Archaeology > Institute of Archaeology Gordon Square |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10220181 |
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