The Legend of Ea-Nasir: how a Babylonian businessman became an internet meme

The Term II thematic seminar series will be concerned with UK Archaeology in 2023. These will be hybrid events, with in-person attendance in Room 612 of the UCL Institute of Archaeology as well as a livestream (and recording) via MSTeams.

Abstract

The Complaint Tablet to Ea-Naṣir was discovered at Ur in the 1920s, and has become known as the world’s oldest customer complaint. In 2015 the Complaint Tablet became a meme, based on popular viral posts on Reddit and tumblr and a surge of international news coverage. Today the Complaint Tablet meme is a hugely popular ‘in-joke’ on tumblr, intermixed with references to popular culture, current affairs, and creative responses including merchandise and fanfic. My analysis of the meme is based on scholarship in memes, fanfic, and the contemporary reception of the ancient near east. 

UCL Institute of Archaeology & Archaeology South-East Research Seminars Programme | Term II, 2022-23

Mondays, 5pm 

• 9 January: Andy Margetts - Medieval Pastoralism: Lessons for our Landscape
• 16 January: Teresa Viera and Jim Stevenson - Drawn swords and the walking dead: the last Iron Age warriors of Britain?
• 23 January: Simon Stevens - The Stiances archaeological project: working with children, animals and the National Archive
• 30 January: Gabriel Moshenska - The Legend of Ea-Nasir: how a Babylonian businessman became an internet meme
• 6 February: Alice Duleba-Dowsett - 13,000 years of natural and human induced landscape change in the Wantsum Valley, Kent

[13 February: UCL Reading Week - no seminar]

• 20 February: Kris Lockyear - Community Geophysics: reflections on the first decade
• 27 February: Kayt Hawkins - A bottle for baby: some aspects of infant care in Roman Britain
• 6 March: Hayley Nicholls - A new lowland hillfort. Presenting the Late Bronze Age enclosed site at Madgwick Lane, Chichester 
• 13 March: Stuart Brookes - Peasant perceptions of landscape: Ewelme hundred, South Oxfordshire, 500–1650 
• 20 March: Anna Doherty - Saltworking at Pococks Field, Eastbourne (title tbc)

Series organisers: Andrew Gardner (andrew.gardner@ucl.ac.uk) and Louise Rayner (louise.rayner@ucl.ac.uk).

Non UCL-IoA/ASE participants should contact Jo Dullaghan (j.dullaghan@ucl.ac.uk) to be added to our events list to receive the MSTeams links.