Tablet UET V 81, written about 1750 BC in Akkadian cuneiform, excavated by Leonard Woolley at Ur from the ruins believed to be Ea-nasir's house, now in the British Museum. Nanni's message, in A. Leo Oppenheim's translation: the fine copper promised to his messenger turned out to be inferior; take it or leave it, the merchant said; the money bag sent for refund came back empty several times, through enemy territory; and the closer: I shall exercise against you my right of rejection because you have treated me with contempt. Ea-nasir was a Dilmun trader, documented in other texts under years 11 and 19 of Rim-Sin I of Larsa. Guinness World Records lists it as the oldest written customer complaint.
Since about 2015 the tablet has lived a second life online as the patron saint of bad vendors: Nanni's rage reads exactly like a modern one-star review, and the internet noticed that the house held more of them. Arbituram wrote that he had not received his copper; another correspondent was tired of receiving bad copper; Imgur-Sin pressed for good ingots for a third man. A whole drawer of complaints, addressed to one man, kept by that man.
The archival question the memes skip: Ea-nasir preserved his complaints. Readings differ: standard business-archive practice, legal self-protection in a trade run on credit and temple deposits, or evidence kept for disputes the tablets only hint at. The scammer reading, popular online, overreaches: one drawer of angry letters proves a high-volume trader, not a fraud, and Oppenheim's corpus shows complaint was a genre, not a verdict.
Four thousand years of commerce later, why is the first voice in the archive a customer saying: you have treated me with contempt?