Shoutout to the time my partner and I got so excited to see Ea-Nasir's hate mail in person that we failed to notice the Code of Hammurabi next to it

(Via @gwillowwilson at Twitter)

selling low quality gaming experiences

item: the global population at 2000 BCE has been estimated, with necessarily large (and indeed unquantified) uncertainties, at between 27M and 72M (wikipedia has references)

item: as of 2020 CE, one estimate of the number of tumblr users was ~29M in the US alone (Statista; tumblr does not release its own statistics)

conclusion: it seems entirely plausible, given the migration of Popular Tumblr Posts™ to other social media sites, that more people know about Ea-Nasir today because of tumblr than were alive on the planet during his lifetime

Ya boy’s doing all right! 

“I wish ancient people preserved their writing and artifacts better” I write in electronic signals on a piece of hardware that can’t retain its efficacy for more than a few decades.

Time to laser-print my entire blog on titanium plates and bury them underground.

brb etching my one-star yelp review of the sheet metal supplier that sold us shitty copper on a granite slab

We are never going to give this guy a fucking break are we

Ea-nasir knows what he did.

But more importantly, WE know what he did. Because it got written down in some rocks.

The funny part is that clay tablets are supposed to be ephemeral. When you’re done with them you just soak them in water, smooth them out, and re-use them for a different message. They weren’t meant to be any more permanent than an email.

The only reason we still have that particular clay tablet is because a. Ea-nasir was a huge weirdo who collected all of his hate mail, and b. his house later burned down, and coincidentally did so at exactly the right temperature to bake the collected tablets into pottery rather than destroying them.

It’s basically the equivalent of an email getting inscribed onto a steel plate by accident.

Ea-Nasir

Conservation status: Least Concern

Classification: Non-native, non-invasive

The Ea-Nasir meme was believed by experts to be extinct since 1750 BCE until a live population was uncovered in 1953 CE. The meme remained critically endangered until introduction to the tumblr ecosystem circa 2015. Ea-Nasir is now a thriving meme and we are proud to classify this species as Least Concern thanks to your conservation efforts.

ALT

Thank you for your interest! We here at the TACM are happy to receive questions from the public.

In 1953, the surviving population of Ea-Nasir memes were found in Ur. The memes, having endured for thousands of years in the absence of internet users, were subsisting entirely on clay tablets.

Now, ironically, this meme survives on the internet due to high quality copper wires.

everyone check your kids halloween candy, i just found some inferior quality copper inside a kit kat??