The World's Oldest Letters

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Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 Ea Natsia.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Amanda Podani, Professor Emeritus of History at California State Polytechnic, and another of our fan favorite guests on the show. We had a lot of fun, and I really do hope you enjoy.
Let's go.

Speaker 1 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, the written word became widespread for the first time.

Speaker 1 People began corresponding with each other over great distances, with messages being delivered on hardened clay tablets in an organized manner, the Bronze Age equivalent of a postal service.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 The stories preserved in these Bronze Age tablets are both memorable and relatable. This is the story of the world's oldest letters with our returning guest, Dr.
Amanda Podani.

Speaker 19 Amanda, it is such a pleasure to have you back on the podcast. It has been too long.

Speaker 21 It's such a pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 I mean, Mesopotamia is home to the oldest letters that we know of.

Speaker 21 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 it's a lot, a big corpus of texts to look at. Yes.

Speaker 19 How many thousands are we talking about?

Speaker 21 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. Wow.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 19 And what is so fascinating about these correspondences from that particular time, from that particular half millennium or so?

Speaker 21 What's really interesting is they'd been writing letters before. They'd had a writing system for 1,200 years by at this time.

Speaker 21 But most of the letters had been very much, at least the ones that had been found, very formal, often between kings.

Speaker 21 You know, there's a sort of sense of that this is just reflecting the world of the very elite people.

Speaker 21 And around 2000 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 Whereas these are, and you sort of feel as though they're speaking across the centuries directly to us.

Speaker 21 And also,

Speaker 21 they were not thinking, I'm writing this for posterity. People in 2025 are going to be reading my letters.

Speaker 21 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,

Speaker 21 that was the tone of them. And so they're very immediate and they feel very real.
And so they're really, really fun.

Speaker 19 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?

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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

Speaker 21 for something, or that they were, you know, that had various concerns that they had to express.

Speaker 21 And sometimes if those concerns were very immediate, you get this sense of drop everything, do this now, I need it right away. Because the letter is going to take maybe days or weeks to get there.

Speaker 21 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 is 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 a rather abrupt tone sometimes yes this is the bronze age equivalent of asap

Speaker 19 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 BC or BCE.
What's happening in Mesopotamia at this time?

Speaker 19 I've got in my notes the old Babylonian period.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And then for the 200 years after that, you sort of see the gradual decline of his large kingdom, but with Babylon being the central focus.

Speaker 21 The time that the earlier time, you have two earlier cities that were more dominant. First the city of Issim and then the city of Larsa.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 But then, again, you see wars break out as happened. But they weren't constant and they weren't affecting everyone all the time.

Speaker 21 For the most part, when you look at these letters, people aren't too much worried about war coming and destroying their city.

Speaker 21 The wars were localized and not ubiquitous all the time.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 21 Yes.

Speaker 19 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?

Speaker 19 Are the so-called like the Sumerian cities on the plain of Sumer, are they also still big at this time?

Speaker 21 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 the same place.

Speaker 21 And those cities that were important in Sumerian times continued to be important, like the city of Uruk and the city of Uruk and the city of Lagash.

Speaker 21 These were cities that continued to be important throughout this time period, even from the third millennium BCE. They had been important.

Speaker 19 And so if literature becomes more, well, not literature, if language, the written language becomes more widespread at this time in this area of the world, the big questions.

Speaker 19 What language are we talking about and how did they write it down?

Speaker 21 Well, by this time, Sumerian was a dead language. That was the original language that the writing system seems to have developed for.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 It's very well known, very well understood. And they used the cuneiform writing system to write Akkadian.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 Contracts might still be in Sumerian, literature might still be in Sumerian, but when you're writing a letter, it's in Akkadian.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 21 Right, 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.

Speaker 21 It wasn't stone, it was clay. And these tablets that they wrote on are surprisingly small.

Speaker 21 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

Speaker 21 the size of a postage stamp so i'm just i'm just getting my mind around that right now so that's they're tiny centimeters yes and they would write in 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 they've got a scribe holding a tablet and it looks as though he's holding a phone because of the way we think.

Speaker 19 The mobile phones of the Bronze Age. Well, there you go.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 I'm going to butcher the pronunciation, but please, I hope you get it right. You say, Ian Nazir, is that how we say it?

Speaker 21 It's Eya. And the second half of his name is Natsir.
It's got a Tussa sound to it because the S has a dot under it, and that makes it Natsir.

Speaker 19 Eya Natsia. Eya Natsia.
Okay, so who is this legend? Amanda, why do we know of this figure? Why is he so internet famous today?

Speaker 21 Okay, well, let me tell you who he was first. He was a man who lived in Ur, which was a city right in the southern part of Mesopotamia.
His house was excavated by Leonard Woolley.

Speaker 21 And so when this was ages ago, a century ago, when he was excavating the house, he found on the floor of the house a number number of tablets that were scattered around, I think 26 of them.

Speaker 21 And these then were excavated and then they were published and

Speaker 21 they were sort of not particularly, nobody paid much attention to them.

Speaker 21 There were other houses with other tablets, but this particular house that belonged to Eyonatsir, what was striking about him was that he was a trader, a sea trader.

Speaker 21 He went, he had boats that traveled all the way through the Gulf to what is now Bahrain, to Dilmun, Dilmun. And he was particularly involved in the copper trade.

Speaker 21 So he's been known about for a very long time.

Speaker 21 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 see trade and who was involved in this trade with Dilman.

Speaker 21 And he was a lovely person. I've had sort of...

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And he was fascinating because he had this connection with Dillman. Now, this was before he was internet famous.
I was ahead of the curve.

Speaker 19 You beat the trend. You beat the trend.
I did the trend.

Speaker 21 I did.

Speaker 21 But I did mention at the time that one of the striking things about these letters is that one of them was from someone who seemed to be a very disgruntled customer who was upset about the quality of the copper that he received.

Speaker 21 So anyway, a 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?

Speaker 21 And I looked at it, I'm like, yeah, Ayamaser, my guy, right? But what had happened was, I think

Speaker 21 the tablet was on display in the British Museum. I have no idea.

Speaker 21 how this started, but somebody saw the tablet and presumably found the translation, which is easily available. It's a 1967 book had published this tablet.

Speaker 21 And it got to be this thing about the first customer complaint, the first, you know, really angry customer.

Speaker 21 And when you read the letter, it does sound like someone just really annoyed when they're trying to get good quality in

Speaker 21 the product that they're buying, and they've been given bad copper. And it is still everywhere.

Speaker 21 I was talking to my husband about it yesterday and he went online to look up, you know, well, who is this Aonat here? And you just find t-shirts and mugs and, you know, I mean, he is everywhere.

Speaker 21 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 BC, that he was the one that has the biggest name today.

Speaker 21 It's as if, you know, you or I, 4,000 years from now, suddenly became the most famous person and everybody knew your name. It's very odd.

Speaker 21 He's been featured in several, there was an article about him in Forbes magazine in 2018, which which I think also kind of pushed the interest in him. I love it.

Speaker 21 I think it's really terrific because what's so nice is that he is sort of a typical Mesopotamian person.

Speaker 21 And one of my goals in what I write is to get people away from only thinking about kings and wars and so forth and looking at real people in real life.

Speaker 21 So I'm just thrilled that Eanacia has this new notoriety.

Speaker 19 I do love. I've got one, I guess it's a meme in front of me at the moment.

Speaker 19 We'll start off with this one just right now, but it's like ancient kings conquering lands and building monuments just to be remembered in history. And then there is Eonatsia.

Speaker 21 Exactly right.

Speaker 19 And there's an image of him as well on here. Normally when there are Eonatsia memes today, they also show this little figurine of a man with a big beard.
Yes. What do we know about that?

Speaker 19 You're shaking your head when I say that.

Speaker 21 Completely unrelated. That sculpture is 900 to 1,000 years older than Eo Natsia.
Oh, God.

Speaker 21 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. Yeah.
It has nothing to do with him at all. It's completely the wrong era.

Speaker 19 Okay, fair enough.

Speaker 21 There is no image of Eonazia, 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.

Speaker 21 So, I mean, it's just Mesopotamian, but he doesn't wear the clothes Aonato would have worn. He doesn't wear, you know, doesn't look anything like him.
So no.

Speaker 19 And can we just explore, I mean, what exactly this complaint is and who the main figures are in it?

Speaker 21 Yes. Okay.
This is actually fun because I've 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 Eonatier chapter.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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 Eonatsia's house.

Speaker 21 And he was someone who Eonatia 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.

Speaker 21 He's more an angry investor who seems to feel that he has, you know, he's really helped Eonatir out. And in here, Eonatzo is not treating him well.

Speaker 21 He's also apparently the father of three other investors. So there are three other people who are named in Eonatzi's archive.
who are described as sons of Nani.

Speaker 21 So this is a family, and this was true in a lot of trading firms in the ancient Near East, that they were often family-based.

Speaker 21 And so we see Eonatzio also worked with his own father, whose name shows up, and he worked with Nani and Nanni's sons and a number of other trading families. So Nani is writing to him.

Speaker 21 And do you want me to read the letter?

Speaker 19 Go on then. Go on then.
Okay, okay.

Speaker 21 This is the traditional translation coming from the Oppenheim.

Speaker 21 I won't read the whole thing, but he says, tell Eonazio, Nani sends the following message. When you came, you said to me as follows, I will give Gimel Sin when he comes fine quality copper ingots.

Speaker 21 You left then, 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.

Speaker 21 I mean, so he's setting up this sort of like

Speaker 21 yes, exactly. This is what supposedly Aanatsia 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?

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 Actually, the word enemy is a little bit misleading here. It's really foreign territory, but anyway.
Is there anyone among the merchants who trade with Dilman who has treated me in this way?

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 I don't think that's right.

Speaker 21 There's a question mark in the translation, and I don't think he actually did owe him money. But anyway, he says, you feel free to speak in such a way.

Speaker 21 Well, I I have given to the palace on your behalf 1,080 pounds of copper. Of course, they didn't say pounds.
They used a different, but that's been translated by the translator.

Speaker 21 And Shumi Abham has likewise given 1,080 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.

Speaker 21 So this other guy, Shumi Abhim, is also one of the investors that shows up in the Vatican. So these are people he knows well.

Speaker 21 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?

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 Take cognizance and from now on, I will not accept here any copper from you that is not of fine quality.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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 gentlemen like us are is

Speaker 19 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 you did take it on board.

Speaker 21 No, this is such an interesting thing because six of these letters are complaint letters.

Speaker 19 Oh, God. Oh, hey, and Nancy.

Speaker 19 I don't know, right?

Speaker 21 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?

Speaker 21 Oh, I don't want to deal with this.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 Within my field, Assyriology, there is a big debate as to whether Ernatsir is actually a good merchant just being maligned by his investors, or whether he really was kind of a flake.

Speaker 21 And there are arguments on both sides.

Speaker 21 My sense is we just don't have enough evidence because the problem is, you're right, he kept the letters 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

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 But the problem is that we don't have a comparable corpus of letters by a good copper merchant because Eonatsir's archive is the only one we have.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And so there's the possibility that he was a good merchant and people just wrote that way.

Speaker 21 My sense is that if you've got six letters complaining, I don't think he was probably the world's most reliable person.

Speaker 21 There are other letters in other types of fields of trade and so forth. they tend to be nicer than these ones.
They tend to be more just straightforward.

Speaker 21 Like, you know, 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.

Speaker 21 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,

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And so there's clearly a whole web of people involved.

Speaker 21 And I think there you have, there's the person who comes to pick up the copper, there's Aonacia providing the copper, there are the investors, 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.

Speaker 21 You know, those sorts of things.

Speaker 21 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 numbers, but thousands of kilograms of copper that he's responsible for that are coming all the way from Dilman, all the way on a boat.

Speaker 21 It's then being distributed in various ways.

Speaker 21 And you could see that if that starts collapsing as a system, if perhaps the copper isn't what people wanted, then they would have to go back to the guy who brought it to Eonazi, but mentioning all these other people who are involved in the transaction.

Speaker 21 So there's several of them. I think I've got four different letters where they say, act in such a way that Idin Sin does not get upset.
Give him good copper so that I will not become upset.

Speaker 21 You know, there's this sort of theme that you need to get this right, or someone's going to be upset about it.

Speaker 21 That, I think, it's a sign that, if not that he was regularly messing up, at least they sort of worried about him doing so.

Speaker 19 Worried about it. Yeah.
Oh, poor man.

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Speaker 19 I like that there are some scholars who are trying to defend Aonats'

Speaker 19 reputation, but I'm afraid the internet has already cast judgment on him in the mean world. I mean, I'm going to go through a few now, and people can say some more in the comments.

Speaker 19 Please absolutely do. My favourite one is actually like from Pirates of the Caribbean 1, I think, and it's the British commander, James Norrington, or someone like that.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 But in this one, they've replaced a pirate.

Speaker 19 He's going, you are, without a doubt, the worst Mesopotamian copper merchant I've ever heard of. And there's like that classic statue of Aanasir and the other man said, ah, but you have heard of me.

Speaker 19 Oh, there's so many more. There's the Lord of the Rings one that began with the forging of the great rings.
They were given to the elves, immortal, wisest, fairest of them all.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 There's Ayanatsir being sour on in Mount Doom.

Speaker 21 Oh, I love these.

Speaker 19 We just have to believe he was a bad copper merchant to keep this all going i mean it's so good trump picks copper merchant aonatia 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 ayanatsia

Speaker 19 could go more there's what's oh my goodness as well people saying give me it back there's a copper coloured tesla and someone somehow ionats returned um

Speaker 19 And also people talking about if they could time travel, that the boys would go back and tell Nana, don't trust Ianatsia, he's going to rip you off, kind of thing. Oh, God.

Speaker 19 Okay, right, that's enough. But that's feminist.

Speaker 21 But you know, you know what? I think resonates with 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 am at my wit's end.

Speaker 21 I cannot get Target to take back this girl, whatever it is.

Speaker 21 You know, you're, you just like want to talk, oh, you get the thing on the phone where you don't get a real human being, and you're like, let me talk to someone.

Speaker 21 That sort of feeling comes through that letter.

Speaker 19 And I think

Speaker 21 because, yeah, because it's 3,900 years ago, 2,800 years ago, it's just so surprising, you know, that there is this

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 But of course, He's just one of so many thousands of people that we know so much about.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 19 Exactly. You've hit the nail on the head there.

Speaker 19 We've started with Eonatsi because this is 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Do we know much about what travel was like for these messengers who were carrying letters or goods at that time.

Speaker 21 I wish they'd written more themselves. We know about them because of what people write in the letters themselves.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 Some of the letters were carried by the scribe who wrote it. So they would write the letter and then take it themselves to where they were going.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 There were even really important diplomats and envoys who would carry their own letters, but it wasn't a postal service.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 So you would ask someone to take this message for you or you would take it yourself. And the really striking thing, Tristan, about this is that that was the only way to communicate long distance.

Speaker 21 We have become, for the, you know, hundreds of years now, at least since the invention of the train, I guess, we realize that things can be moved without a person physically walking there, right?

Speaker 21 You can get a message, and especially since the telegraph, you can get a message over a long distance almost instantly.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And this is what I find so interesting, because this is the first instance of that. This is when we have that beginning.

Speaker 21 And it continued, as I say, right up until the steam trains, I guess, that somebody

Speaker 21 had to like take it in their hand and go off and carry the letter. And yet everything went incredibly smoothly.
I mean, Ernatsu notwithstanding.

Speaker 21 In a way, though,

Speaker 21 even his letters show just how smoothly things went, because he was able to get the copper when he needed it in Dilworn, and people were able to get it from him.

Speaker 21 And they may have complained about the quality, but it was a working system.

Speaker 21 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,

Speaker 21 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, they would be needing to be bilingual in some cases, depending on how far they were traveling.

Speaker 21 Eonatzo probably was bilingual, whatever language they were speaking in Dilman, he would have had to know how to speak it.

Speaker 21 So there was a lot of interaction 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.

Speaker 21 So,

Speaker 21 notoriously, Woolley gave Eonatsir 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.

Speaker 21 The streets were unnamed. The houses were unnumbered.
So you were sent with a letter for Eonatsir in Ur. Go find him.

Speaker 21 And there are no maps. And so they didn't have a, you know, leveling, you know, GPS, which we're so dependent upon now, but even just a map showing where you were going.

Speaker 21 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 Sippar.

Speaker 21 And after you went from Sippar, 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.

Speaker 21 And when you got to that city, people would know how to get to the next city. You know, they would be able to give you directions.

Speaker 21 And then when you got to the city where you were delivering the letter, presumably you just said, where does the Anatsu live? And somebody would know, and they would direct you there.

Speaker 21 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. And it was what they did for centuries.

Speaker 21 That was just how you sent letters.

Speaker 19 I mean, surely there must be a couple of examples or it must have happened where, you know, recipient no longer at address or something like that, you know, or like almost the equivalent of like new phone hoodis at the same time, you know, where like, you know,

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 21 Well, but there are letters certainly where people,

Speaker 21 there's one I was working on recently where a man writes to his partner, who is 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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 traveled 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 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.

Speaker 21 Would you please tell me how you are doing?

Speaker 21 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?

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 People seem to go to Babylon and disappear. They're just having a good time.
Sorry, not in touch.

Speaker 19 Exactly.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 They wouldn't send that.

Speaker 19 We should go back to some more stories now. We've done Eonatsia, but I know that there are a couple more that are very close to your heart.

Speaker 19 So do you have some favourite letters that capture just how human these writers were?

Speaker 21 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 Eonatsia's letter was first published.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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

Speaker 21 he writes to his mother and he says, tell the lady Zenu, Idin Sin sends the following message. And that sounds really formal.

Speaker 21 We would say, dear mom, but this is just how everybody addressed their letters.

Speaker 21 So he's writing to his mother, and then he gives a little request for the gods to take care of her, which they did at the beginning of every letter.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 19 I just love that.

Speaker 21 It's just so good.

Speaker 21 He's just like, I need better clothes and I'm going to manipulate my mother into sending them by making her feel so guilty.

Speaker 19 Oh my dears, yeah, it's I've I just typed it into Google search engine at the same time.

Speaker 19 I couldn't find any memes, but there is a Reddit page and it just says, spoiled brat from ancient Babylon writes to his mum complaining that she doesn't buy him enough fancy clothes.

Speaker 21 Exactly. But he's not buying them.
She's making them, right? She's making them exactly. So the maiden of the household, well, she probably had weavers who worked for her.

Speaker 21 His dad, we know a lot more about him than that letter suggests. His father was a man named Shamash Hazir, who was a high official for Hammurabi.

Speaker 21 And Shamash Hazir's archive has been found, and this letter was in that archive. So it was among his personal documents, but he also has his business documents.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 But he's definitely concerned that he needs to look the cart. You know, his dad is Shamash Hazir.
He needs to look like he's someone important and his clothes are not up to it.

Speaker 21 And but the sort of like, you do not love me at the end. Oh my goodness,

Speaker 21 that's classic. But again, this, we don't know much about Edinson, 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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 if you were poor, you wouldn't have one.

Speaker 21 And so you would put an impression of the hem of your garment in place of a cylinder seal.

Speaker 21 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

Speaker 21 sort of an assertion of your willingness to do whatever the contract said or to abide by it, that it counted in place of a sounder seal.

Speaker 19 I think completely.

Speaker 19 I think sometimes in the world that we live in, the 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.

Speaker 19 And it was, you know, not you it was usually associated with the mother or the women, wasn't it, in the household.

Speaker 19 And this is once again, this letter,

Speaker 19 it shines a light on that. You know, something that you'll see across cultures.
I think there's a Vinderlander letter as well about a soldier asking for socks.

Speaker 19 I don't know if it's to his mum or not, but once again, it's a similar thing, isn't it? It's the requesting of clothing from someone that they know.

Speaker 19 And in this case, it's from this young adult, high-ranking adult, to his mum. It's lovely.

Speaker 21 Yes, exactly. I have another letter, may I?

Speaker 19 Yes, absolutely. Let's go on to the next one.

Speaker 21 Okay, okay. So this one is another one that is about children, but this is about a very, very small child.

Speaker 21 So the letter is written by a man who was the secretary of a king, and the king was named Zimri Lim. He was the king of Mari.

Speaker 21 And so he says, say to my lord, thus says Shu Nu Chakalu, your servant, concerning the infant Yarim Lim.

Speaker 21 Now, the limb 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.

Speaker 21 Now, this is not Hammurabi of Babylon. This is another Hammurabi.
Hammurabi said to me, Winter is arriving. How could this child travel?

Speaker 21 Come now, if this child goes, along with the horses, the oxen, and whatever gifts I would convey to my brother, Zimrilem, that accompany the youngster, with all the muck and cold, how could he go?

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 This is what Hammurabi replied to me. So love this one because you have this baby, right? It's wintertime.
They think the baby needs to travel to Mari.

Speaker 21 And this guy, Hammurabi, whoever this Hammurabi is, is going, this is not a smart idea.

Speaker 21 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 wintertime to the palace. It's just such a common sense sort of thing.

Speaker 21 it evokes such an interesting moment where Zimrilim has simply said, bring the baby. And he's like, hold on, think about that.

Speaker 19 The

Speaker 21 That's going to be a bit of a challenge. There's a lot of things that the baby needs, and one of them is probably a two-month-old not being put in a wagon with a bunch of gifts.

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Speaker 19 Do you think it also kind of shines a light on the king perhaps being a bit, well, ignorant towards like 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,

Speaker 19 I think you need to think about this again. I don't think you quite understand how babies work.

Speaker 21 Exactly. Actually, this is a man who's writing it, Shanakarala.

Speaker 19 Sorry, man. The secretary, you know, he's a man.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 You cannot just put a baby somewhere and assume the baby's going to be fine.

Speaker 21 So yes, I think Zimri Lim might have been a little bit out of touch with what the needs of babies might be. Yeah.

Speaker 19 Well, I believe you probably got another letter for us, don't you, Amanda?

Speaker 21 I don't have it to read, but there is, I can tell you because it's a whole correspondence, but a series of letters that, again, Zimri Lim, in this case, it's his daughter, and his daughter was named Kirim.

Speaker 21 He had a number of daughters. I think he had 11.
And he married them off to various local kings and officials because diplomatic marriage was an important way of keeping the kingdom united.

Speaker 21 And so there was a king named Hayasumu, and Hayasumu was a very difficult vassal of Zimrielin's. He was someone who tended to fly off the handle.
He was someone who was erratic.

Speaker 21 He would make an allegiance, an alliance with someone, or so pledge allegiance to one king, and then he would turn around and switch his allegiance.

Speaker 21 And so Zimrielin had already married one of his daughters to Hayasumu. And that had worked well for her, but she got along well with her husband, which means that she actually turned on her father.

Speaker 21 So that was not good for him. He was even accusing her of witchcraft and things.
So first daughter went off, became a bit of a problem. Second daughter, Kirim, is sent off to marry Hayasumu.

Speaker 21 And we have a series of letters from the daughter. And it's less common to get...
letters from women. You know,

Speaker 21 most of the letters are from men, not all of them, though.

Speaker 21 And this daughter, Kirim, 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.

Speaker 21 And they get increasingly nervous and anxious to come home. She is initially not allowed her maids, they're taken away.

Speaker 21 And then she starts complaining that Hayasumu 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 But the very sweet thing about them is how much she trusts her dad to rescue her.

Speaker 21 That he, and he, there are letters from him showing that he was indeed trying to rescue her, that she asks for chariot to be sent to pick her up so that she can get back home.

Speaker 21 And she at one point, she's so desperate, she says, you know, send it, or I'm going to throw myself off the roof. I mean, she is really terrified.

Speaker 21 And the really sad thing about this correspondence is you're reading it and you're going, what's going to happen to her next? Is she going to be okay?

Speaker 21 And then we don't hear.

Speaker 19 There's like no other letters. So we have no other letters.

Speaker 21 But I think that's a good sign.

Speaker 21 I think had something happened, we would have had letters, you know, Kirim's been killed by Hayazumu, and they obviously Zimri Lim at that point would have gone to war against his vassal because he wouldn't have accepted that.

Speaker 21 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 Dad.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 You know, she would, at that point, have been back at the same palace with her father. But the sort of care for her that he reflects in his attempts to rescue her is really touching.

Speaker 21 And her description of her relationship with her sister, which was very fraught, that's interesting too.

Speaker 21 There's all of these dynamics that you don't think about when you just hear, oh, there was a diplomatic diplomatic marriage. Yes.

Speaker 21 Whereas

Speaker 21 if the relationship between the two kings wasn't good, the relationship between the Basil king and his wife could be bad. All sorts of fascinating aspects like that.
And so that's an example.

Speaker 19 Completely. In so many of these ancient societies, the diplomatic marriages where we usually make it quite clear that the princesses are effectively just pawns.

Speaker 19 and they're given to X, Y, and Z to secure a political agreement or secure borders and so on. But at least with this letter, they become a bit more than that.

Speaker 19 And actually, you see the human side behind it.

Speaker 19 And actually the fact that hopefully in this case, no, 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 away from this marriage, which is just nice compared to that thing.

Speaker 21 Yeah, and interestingly, they weren't, although, yes, the marriages were set up as though they were just pawns in a chess game.

Speaker 21 But once they got there, and this was true of another of Zimmerlim's daughters, they kind of become spies for their dad.

Speaker 21 And 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.

Speaker 21 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 tie with their father.

Speaker 21 And so you see that for hundreds of years, that that seems to have been a continuing relationship. So they're not powerless at all.
These are women who they're powerless over who they marry.

Speaker 21 Yes, they're sent to marry a particular 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.

Speaker 19 Very, very interesting indeed.

Speaker 19 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 I think we've also briefly covered when we did the Bronze Age Brotherhood of Kings, Akhenaten.

Speaker 19 He liked a good letter, didn't he?

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And so whereas in Eonatio'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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And the Babylonian king writes back and he said, I know you sent this gold sort of in good faith, and it must be just because someone other than you sealed the bag.

Speaker 21 But when I put this gold in the kiln, nothing came up, meaning that he doesn't mean nothing.

Speaker 21 He means there was very little gold, that it was perhaps alloyed with something else, or perhaps it was gold-plated bricks, or who knows, but it was not the solid gold that Akhenaten had promised.

Speaker 21 And so there he's giving Akhenaten an out. He's saying, it wasn't your fault.
Next time, just make sure you check the gold, not your quote, trustworthy official who was ripping me off.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And again, he was sort of, why would you send me these gold leaf statues when you promised me solid gold? And that same tone of, you know, Nani's tone in his letter to Ayonatsir of like,

Speaker 21 I wanted something and you've sent me something different.

Speaker 21 But the difference with the kings is that whereas Nani takes this very sort of imperious tone with Eyonatsir, I think he's probably seeing himself as the superior partner and he's he's berating Eonatsir.

Speaker 21 The kings couldn't do that. They had to always be polite to each other and always maintain this sort of pretense of,

Speaker 21 well, you would never have meant to do this, I realize. And I'm sure the gold statues are still on their way.

Speaker 19 It's rather relatable today, isn't it? Maybe not the king's bit, but almost like sending an email to someone if you've sent them an email, but they haven't replied yet.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 So, as you say, as you brilliantly surmised, it gives them an out at the start, but it also underlines

Speaker 19 you want something done about it.

Speaker 21 Yes, yeah.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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. We are going to have to say this.

Speaker 21 And that, I think, is very telling. There's one last letter.
I've got so many of them, but there's one.

Speaker 21 This was in Brotherhood of Kings, actually, where a king of Katna was writing to the king of Ekalatim. And he says exactly that.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And it wasn't worth what I, you know, I gave you really beautiful, I gave you horses, I gave you these amazing horses, and you sent me back some tin. Tin is not worth, what the horses are worth.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 19 Yeah, what did I send you? I sent you gold. You sent me poor quality copper by this guy called Aonatsir.
What the hell are you doing? Imagine if you found that. That would be quite something.

Speaker 19 That would be good. Yes.
Amanda, this has been such a fun chat.

Speaker 19 And the things that I'm taking away from it, I mean, one, Eyonatsir, the judgment is still despite the meme world having already decided.

Speaker 19 Two,

Speaker 19 like how relatable these letters are to us today, which just is so lovely to get that insight, even the kings, but obviously more focusing on the people beneath.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 21 It's really true.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And that there were a lot of people involved in it and a lot of understood connections.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 It was all very, very much about human connection. and about these unwritten rules of civility and of

Speaker 21 getting things done fast, you know, making sure that a letter was replied to, that

Speaker 21 a shipment of something was sent when you would say that you were going to send it. Because, yes, unlike today, they couldn't just text and say, hey, it hasn't arrived yet.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And there is a lot of trust in their system. And a lot of what seemed to be actually really

Speaker 21 sort of hardworking, conscientious people who were not always nasty to each other.

Speaker 21 I think that's the one thing that perhaps Aonazir has given a slightly misapprehension about, which is the sort of the sense that were they all this rude to each other?

Speaker 21 No, no, no, that's not the case.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And again, that was where Eonazio made his first appearance 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.

Speaker 21 That one is not long. That one is very short.
Then the most recent one is... Weaver, Scribes, and Kings, A New History of the Ancient Near East.
That's the one.

Speaker 19 Much bigger, which is a very, very chunky book, but a very, very highly received.

Speaker 19 It's everything you need to know about the ancient Near East from kings to everyday people. It's brilliant.

Speaker 21 Lots of everyday people.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And a lot of that book is based on letters, actually.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 19 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?

Speaker 19 Because I feel I have from the outside.

Speaker 21 That's nice to hear that you're feeling it too.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And we have documentation of a kind that one really doesn't have for almost any other ancient culture.

Speaker 21 These documents that were not meant to survive, they're not all literary, they're not all royal inscriptions.

Speaker 21 There's enormous, I mean, the vast majority of materials that survive were not intended to.

Speaker 21 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. And it's such a vibrant civilization.

Speaker 21 It's so full of interesting people. So I hope you're right.
I really do.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 And I think people have often assisted my students when they come to class for the first time, they think, oh, this is so long ago.

Speaker 21 They must have all just been killing each other all the time and they didn't have any laws and they just behaved.

Speaker 21 Yeah, that sort of yes, image. And not true at all.

Speaker 21 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

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 21 Thank you very much for having me.

Speaker 19 I've really enjoyed it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I hope you enjoyed this episode just as much as I did recording it. It's wonderful to cover the story of Eanatsia and so many others.

Speaker 1 So yes, hope to see more Eyanatsia 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.

Speaker 1 So get think.

Speaker 1 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 favor.

Speaker 1 If you'd be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, well, we'd really appreciate that. And not a bad rating like ANATZER, okay?

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That's all from me.

Speaker 1 I'll see you in the next episode.

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