Bronze Age Memes EXPLAINED | Part 1 - Ea-Nasir

Have you ever randomly encountered one of those bronze age meme videos on YouTube and wondered who the heck is this guy? Who's this Aeonysir guy that keeps getting mentioned? And why is he such a skeevy copper merchant? And is this really Aeonysir or is it just some random statue that's been willed into being him by all these memes? And if so, are there any actual depictions of the real Aeonysir? Well, those are the questions I'm going to try to answer in this video. If you like it, there might be a part two where I answer, who the hell is this guy? What does mean? And what's all that weird chanting about? Well, I was just wondering the exact same thing. So today I'm going to try to start revealing the actual real life backstories of these strange ancient artifacts and what they actually meant before being turned into brain rot. Okay, let's start off with this guy, who's often implied to be Aeonysir himself. But off the bat, I have to break some bad news. Unfortunately, this can't actually be Aeonysir because it was made sometime between 800 and 1100 years before Aeonysir lived, which was in the early 18th century BC. That's because this statue here was made anywhere between 2900 and 2600 BC, and less importantly, they're from two different ancient Sumerian cities. Aeonysir lived in the famous city of Ur, and this guy, whoever he was, lived in the somewhat lesser known but still rather impressive city of Eshnunna, which is now an archaeological site called Tel Asmar. The statue was actually part of a horde of 11 other figurines more or less like him, known as the Tel Asmar Horde, which was discovered in 1934 during excavations led by Henry Frankfurt and Setton Lloyd for the University of Chicago. The horde was discovered in the remains of a temple containing three different shrines known as the Square Temple, likely dedicated to a poorly understood god of vegetation and fertility named Abu. It started off as an archaic shrine with only one sanctuary before 3000 BC, but was continuously remodeled and expanded for hundreds and hundreds of years until the time of Sargon of Akkad's dynasty, so it was actually contemporary to and sort of like Stonehenge, though it was eventually replaced with another single sanctuary shrine. The Square Temple proper was itself reconstructed four different times. Under the level of the second reconstruction, the statue horde was found carefully stored within a 0.6 meter deep cavity, dug next to the altar of a room named Shrine II, though according to the original excavators, the three largest were placed there before the rest were quote unquote carefully just piled on top of them. Sheer weight of the earth eventually shattered them, so they did have to be put back together, but otherwise they're incredibly well preserved, with their colors and shell and lapis lazuli eye inlays remaining mostly intact, suggesting to the original excavators that they were buried relatively soon after being made. Unfortunately for our guy though, he's actually missing his original legs and base, and I think part of one of his arms too. So let's move on to the statues themselves. As you can see, they vary considerably in size, and Pseudo-Anasir over here definitely isn't the biggest of the bunch. He's made of white gypsum or gypsum alabaster, depends on the source, and has eyes which retain their original shell and black limestone inlays. Bitumen, i.e. natural asphalt, was used to paint the hair. The high quality of these sorts of materials suggests that the men and women depicted here were likely elites of some sort. They could be officials, or maybe they're just commoners who could afford to commission them, or both, who knows. Most also have their hands clasped together, and let me just tell you, I love this gesture, and this is a bit embarrassing, but sometimes I even sort of subconsciously emulate it when I don't know what else to do with my hands. Some of them, including ours, also hold what are known as solid-footed goblets. Interestingly, hundreds of examples of those same solid-footed goblets were found in the temple, and were likely used to pour out ritual libations. But of course their most striking features are their enormous, dare I say, anime-esque eyes, which are especially apparent in the larger ones. As you can see, they're also rather idealized and abstract and geometric, especially with how they're basically just sets of cones. Their whole bodies are basically cones, and the men's long beards make their heads cones, with the all-important eyes of the base. But all the same, they still preserve a remarkable amount of vitality in their details. One of the excavators even commented, this group as a whole invites comparison with a set of musical variations on a given theme. Our statue is so typical of the general style that the excavators copped out of giving it a full description by just saying it was basically identical to the rest, though even with that one, they did have to note that unlike any other statue, its beard and hair are carved differently. So what even are these things? Well, it seems like they're probably worshippers, standing in perpetual prayer on behalf of their various owners. Since just as gods were thought to physically inhabit their idols, humans were also considered equally present within their statues. You see this sort of stuff from ancient Egypt, too. Statues of people were thought to literally contain their ka, or living essence. So in tombs, statues of the deceased were offered food and drink, and the numerous statues of priests found in great temples like Karnak were meant to allow those people to participate in temple rituals forever. Well, or at least until they were disposed of. There are also very similar Sumerian sculptures from another temple from around the same era as these ones called the Temple Oval at nearby Kafaja, ancient Tutu, likely dedicated to the goddess Inanna. The identification of the largest statues of the bunch, which also frequently feature in Bronze Age ship posts, is a little more contentious, though, since they have multiple unique features. Like, even compared to the other members of the group, they have extremely large eyes, and their faces are held up a bit higher than those of the others. The front of the largest one's pedestal is also covered in a known as the Anzu, clutching two horned animals, a motif associated with the thunder god Ninurta and Abu, which also may have been different names for the same god. The large female figure was also once accompanied by another much smaller figure to her left that only survives through its feet, held onto the base with bitumen. As such, the excavators concluded that the large male figure represents none other than the god of the square temple, Abu, while the female figure represents the mother goddess. That isn't for certain, though, and more recent commentators have suggested that the guy is just some leader who viewed himself as being in the same heroic mold as Gilgamesh, and depicted himself as such. There's also a little bit of a debate over the statue's exact age, and which exact period they should be assigned to. The excavators thought that they dated to the Early Dynastic II period, and because this horde is so significant, temples with such sculpture in them were also automatically attributed to the Early Dynastic II period. But more modern scholars, like Jean M. Evans, who's published a paper on this, tend to think that both the archaic Abu shrine and the square temple actually both belong to the Early Dynastic I period. Photographs also seem to show that the horde was found considerably below the level of the square temple's floor, so it's possible that the statues predate the square temple itself, but who knows. In addition to all that, the square temple also contained this strange semi-translucent alabaster figurine of a kneeling, nude, bearded man or mythological figure, wearing a distinct girdle that probably acted as a piece of temple furniture because of its hollow headdress. It's also quite similar to copper furniture supports of these same sort of nude guys wearing girdles from Kefasha. I've got to be completely honest, I have no clue what these are, but I think they're pretty interesting. But anyways, the reason why these statues were hidden despite their apparent sanctity remains unknown. Maybe it was a desperate measure taken to save them during a siege or during some period of civil strife, but it's also just possible that it was part of another temple reconstruction. At the same level as this, for Shrine I, votive offerings like amulets, seals, stone vases, and copper mirrors were found partly inside the brickwork of the renovated altar there, maybe indicating that when reconstructions happened, the temple's equipment was changed up a bit. But even then, the statues were probably still somewhat fresh, given how well preserved they are. And they probably weren't hidden to save them from some destructive event because there aren't any indications of a fire or anything like that in the temple. The horde was initially divvied up between the National Museum of Iraq and the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute in Chicago, which was recently renamed. But uniquely, our statue wound up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, because they and the Oriental Institute exchanged some artifacts with each other in the year 1940. Unfortunately, I don't know if it's currently on display, because the Met's doing a massive overhaul of their Mesopotamia galleries. When I visited in the summer of 2023, they were inaccessible. But the Met's online catalogue entry for this does say that this particular piece is on display in Gallery 202, the Great Hall Balcony, which is this arcade filled with neat old Chinese pottery overlooking the museum's grand old entrance. It's Great Hall. I did go there, but I don't remember seeing it there. But hey, maybe I just didn't look close enough. Or maybe things have changed. Also, I think it's important to note that this catalogue entry is probably the reason why this statue has been interpreted as Ianisir, because all the images that the Met has of its artifacts, except for the ones that are on loan, are in the public domain. So this all got me wondering, are there any actual or even potential depictions of the real Ianisir from the time and place in which he actually lived? Well, to answer that, we gotta look into who Ianisir actually was, and when and where he lived. By Ianisir's time, centuries had passed since the city of Ur's peak in the Neo-Sumerian period during the last century of the 3rd millennium BC, when the 3rd dynasty of Ur ruled most of Mesopotamia. And the early 18th century BC, when Ianisir himself was around, did see both stability and incredible upheaval, including with the overseas copper trade that he was a major player in. Ur was sacked by the Elamites in or around 2004 BC, and its king Ibi-Sin was whisked off to Elam, in what's now Iran, never to be seen again. The city's power had been irreparably broken, but because of its already considerable age and sanctity, the competing kings of the cities of Isin and Larsa continuously fought over it. This continued into the early 18th century BC. But then, around 1794 or 1792 BC, Isin was conquered by King Rim-Sin of Larsa, who we know Ianisir operated under, specifically between Rim-Sin's 10th and 33rd years on the throne. For reference, Isin was captured halfway through his 60-year-long reign. And that was the definitive high-water mark of his power. But in turn, that famous Hammurabi guy from Babylon, you know, the eye-for-an-eye guy, conquered Rim-Sin's realm, including Ur. The city seems to have thrived under his rule, and there was a lot of building activity there at the time. But after rebelling against Babylon following Hammurabi's demise, Hammurabi's son, sacked the city around 1738 BC in his 11th regnal year, which was known as the year in which the king destroyed the walls of Ur. He also destroyed whole portions of the city and left a lot of it scorched by fire. Ur did sort of recover a little while later under Kassite rule and was inhabited up until the time of Alexander the Great, when the Euphrates River shifted its course. But after Samsu-Illuna's sack, it would never be the same. Ironically, because of that, though, the houses from the Isin-Larsa and Old Babylonian phase of Ur's occupation are very well preserved, and gave the great archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley a great picture of how life was lived there when he worked there between 1922 and 1934. On behalf of none other than the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania, Woolley referred to what was probably Ea-Nasir's own house as number one old street, and it's in an intricately complex residential site called Site A.H., which sort of jokingly stands for Abraham's Housing, because one of the houses there has been nicknamed Abraham's House. But as Trey the Explainer delved into in his latest video, unfortunately Abraham probably didn't actually live there. But we do know that number one old street probably belonged to Ea-Nasir because his personal archive of clay tablet letters was found there. There is a bit of uncertainty over just which and how many tablets were found there, because tablets were only given catalog numbers after being cleaned and baked in sand, but that number probably includes the most famous reference to Ea-Nasir, this little dry pop-tart looking thing in the British Museum, specifically room 56 on the upper floor. It's a letter his disgruntled customer named Noddy sent to him, basically complaining about how he'd been given the wrong grade of copper from the faraway trading hub of Dilmun, and that an additional delivery had been misdirected and delayed. I'll just read out the full thing for you. Tell Ea-Nasir Noddy sends the following message. When you came, you said to me as follows, I will give Gimil-Sin, when he comes, fine quality copper ingots. You left then, but you did not do what you promised me. You put ingots which were not good before my messenger sits in, and said, if you want to take them, take them. If you do not want to take them, go away. So basically the ancient phrasing for take it or leave it. What do you take me for, that you treat somebody like me with such contempt? I have sent his 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. Is there anyone among the merchants who trade with Telmun who has treated me in this way? You alone treat my messenger with contempt, on account of that one trifling mina of silver which I owe you. You feel free to speak in such a way, while I have given to the palace on your behalf a thousand and eighty pounds of copper, and Sumi Album has likewise given a thousand and eighty pounds of copper, apart from what we both have had written on a sealed tablet to be kept in the Temple of Samash. How have you treated me for that copper? You have withheld my money bag from me in enemy territory. It is now up to you to restore my money to me in full. Take cognizance that from now on I will not accept here any copper from you that is not of fine quality. I shall from now on select and take the ingots individually in my own yard, and I shall exercise against you my right of rejection, because you have treated me with contempt. Thank you, thank you. You can stop clapping now. I know it was an excellent performance. Anyways, so what can we learn from that? Well, clearly the palace levied insane custom duties, and Ian Assire probably operated under some sort of palace supervision as the big man of Ur's copper trade. King Rim-Sin may have even centralized supervising responsibilities from local officials to the palace of Larsa during his reign. We also learn that Ian Assire was a private entrepreneur, a wholesale importer of immense quantities of copper, and a member of an increasingly large and wealthy professional class in Ur, distinct from the old royal elite, and forming a big part of Ian Assire's own clientele as a seafaring merchant. He also dealt in second-hand clothes, land speculation, and usury, but most importantly he was part of a relatively small guild of seafaring merchants that went on voyages to a far-off trading hub named Telmun, or Dilmun, probably in what's now Bahrain, and these guys were called the Alik Telmun. They exchanged stuff like bits of silver, oils, food, leather, textiles, and even garments with Dilmun's traders for all the stuff they could bring to the table in turn. Remember, coins didn't exist yet, money was just stuff. Since Mesopotamia doesn't have its own metals, the most important thing Dilmun's traders could offer was their copper, which included raw copper and finished goods made of the stuff. Another document referencing Ian Assire says he once imported a large copper kettle. They also had the timber used to roof Mesopotamia's large public building. Beads made of precious stone like carnelian and lapis lazuli, soft stones like steatite, and even ivory. Bahrain didn't produce much of that stuff itself, so it more so acted as neutral trading hub for traders coming from further afield, from the mysterious lands of Makan, or Magan, and Meluha. Makan was known for its special Makan onions and as the country of mines. It's either identifiable with places further south in Arabia, like Oman, or the Iranian coast, around where Strabo said there were copper mines in ancient Acromania. Meluha is a bit more mysterious. It's been identified with coastal Balochistan, western India, and Pakistan, i.e. the Indus Valley civilization, and even Ethiopia, and it's possible that the name referred to multiple of those places at different times. The whole way in which this overseas trade worked is actually eerily reminiscent of modern venture capitalism, with these seafaring merchants depending on private investors to make their journeys, through the investors' funds and the merchandise itself, which the investors often refuse to share the risk on. Whereas previously, during the time of the third dynasty of Ur, when Mesopotamia was way more intimately connected with its overseas neighbors, Ur's merchants traded with what they received from the storehouses of the temple of the god Nana. But besides that, there are at least 14 other letters addressed to Anasir by various other small-time businessmen in Ur that have to do with Anasir's shady copper dealings. I can't cover all of them, but in case you want to check them out yourself, they're in W.F. Lehman's 1960 book, Foreign Trade in the Old Babylonian Period. The link is in the description. There's even another one from Nani, which seems to be much more positive and maybe predates the more famous one because it's where Nani initially asks Anasir to give his messenger good copper. In this one, he even blesses him at the start. The fact that he doesn't start the other letter with a blessing formula indicates he's pissed. It seems that in Nani's case, he was himself a that had entrusted Anasir with a lot of trading capital, referred to as his money bag or purse, to buy copper in Telmun on his behalf, and the behalf of another guy named Erebam Sin. But clearly, Anasir hadn't delivered yet. On top of that, it seems that Anasir shafted yet another customer, a guy named Arbituram, who sent him two letters of his own. Basically, it seems that Arbituram was desperate for the trading capital he'd given Anasir, and the profit in copper it had produced. Another guy named Ili-Idanam had also given his trading capital to Anasir, but Anasir had kept it for one year or even longer, and so Ili-Idanam was getting fed up. So he sarcastically says, now the work that you have done is good. Anasir, being entrusted with silver for periods as long as a year or more, and the letters implying that he didn't always sail back with the copper himself and was always in a foreign land, seems to suggest that he had stayed in Telmun for quite a lot of time, and maybe received these letters there before bringing them back to his home base in Ur. But Wully's excavations of that house revealed a sadder side to Anasir's story that never seems to be mentioned. He lived in a house filled with corpses. So let's talk about that house. It starts with a long, cramped passageway that leads into a lobby called room 1, which led to a central court, room 2, with stairs to the roof, which hasn't survived. South of that, room 3 was a chapel of sorts that had once been connected to neighboring chapels. Interestingly, it seems the house was much larger at one point, but bits of it had been blocked off and incorporated into other neighboring buildings. There was also an unpaved area opening to the north of the central court, which contained a rough, raised square of burnt brickwork, which was probably used to cook meals, called room 7. We know one of the tablets mentioning Anasir was found in the doorway between this and room 2, but the fine spots of the rest aren't known for certain. Also, at least three of the rooms had their own drains. Room 4, just to the west of room 3, was a little lavatory, but here's where things start getting weird. A small coffin was buried underneath it. Next to that, room 5 contained a low altar at one end, and on top of that was the lower part of a table. In front of that, within the pavement, there was an infant burial contained within two bowls. Since the bowls were flush with the pavement, it doesn't seem to have ever been concealed. And below the pavement lay a vaulted brick tomb. Room 6, the next door over, seems to have been the home's one intended chapel, since it had an incense hearth and chimney in a niche behind a dais with another altar and a low table on it, like what's depicted here, I'm guessing. Next to this altar, there was another infant burial in a hutch coffin, also flush with the pavement, and also likely left unhidden. And beneath its pavement, there was another brick vaulted tomb, which went unexcavated. So, Anasir had to live amongst all these corpses, which begs the question, how are these people connected to him? Other domestic chapels in Ur did contain individual infant burials like this, since, unfortunately, infant mortality was incredibly high, and vault tombs for the adults in a family were also customarily made beneath houses, so it wasn't unusual by Sumerian standards of the time. But what did these people mean to Anasir? And was Anasir himself buried in one of those vault tombs? Are these maybe just possibly part of the reason why Anasir spent so much time away in a far-off land? I don't think we'll ever know, but three of the seven rooms in the house were essentially graves, though we don't know what was going on up on the roof, so it must have been pretty depressing, I imagine. But who knows, maybe the guy didn't mind. And back to the question of whether or not there might be any real depictions of him. Contract Tablet AO-8484 is about how a guy named Sin-Uselli was loaned silver by a guy named Urim-Nasir, stipulating that after 30 days, he had to bring it to Susa in a lawn. But if the journey took too long, he had to pay the silver to witnesses who had their seals affixed to the tablet. And guess who that included? Anasir. So one of the little seal impressions drawn here could well belong to the man, the myth, the legend himself. So I wonder, one of those little stick figures on those seals was meant to depict Anasir himself. Well, he also found a number of nice terracotta reliefs of normal people at ore dating to the Larsa period, the same time period as Anasir, so I guess any one of these could be him, though we'll never know, of course. But Anasir lived at the end of an era. Sometime around the transition between the Larsa dynasty and the decline of Hammurabi's own dynasty, right after Anasir's time, Telmun lost contact with Makan and Meluha, and so was forced to start primarily exporting its own agricultural products, like dates. Ivory also almost completely disappears from Mesopotamia, and maybe not coincidentally, the dockyard at the Indus Valley civilization city of Lothal also fell into disuse around this point. One author, A. L. Oppenheim, proposed that the Harappans just stopped coming, and since the Sumerians were always short on timber, they couldn't go chasing after them like how the Harappans had come to them. To make things worse for any wannabe Anasirs, Hammurabi's conquests in northern Mesopotamia also allowed his empire access to Anatolian and Cypriot copper instead. So before the video ends, I have a couple of announcements. Number one, I am switching to making shorter, more self-contained videos like this one. The icebergs are fun to do, don't get me wrong, but they're pretty daunting to make. Same with country profiles, like the Greenland video, or the perspective video on North Korean archaeology. So over the summer, expect a lot more of this sort of stuff. I have some exciting video ideas with titles like The True Story of Cats in Ancient Egypt, What Were the Actual Original Goth Girls Like, and of course, Who Were the Earliest Weebs? And maybe a video on the true identity of the Sea Peoples or whatever, but I don't know if anyone would be interested in that, but those are in the future. The reason why I've been absent for the past month and a half is because I've been working like non-stop on scripts and research for Ouparts Part 4, but now the script is crazy, crazy, crazy long, and I don't really know if I'm even able to make it into a full video at this point, so I might release the scripts on Patreon, so look out for that. Also, I'm sorry to the people who are disappointed that this isn't the snail video I promised, but I will get that out eventually, probably for next April Fools. I'd also like to thank my friend Crimson, an eminent British antiquarian, for creating this incredibly detailed and surprisingly accurate banner for the YouTube channel, so thank you so much Crimson. And you know who else I have to thank? 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