Record — a setter’s blog, by Deuce
I can’t remember where I first encountered the complaint tablet to Ea-Nasir. It’s a remarkable combination of commercial and personal gripes — in which the author, Nanni, lashes out not just at the poor quality product he’s been fobbed off with, but also the slight he feels from being disrespected. You can imagine reading this text as an online review some time in the early 2020s; except Amazon don’t sell copper ingots, and this was written in 1750BC.
Instead of simply sending an email or webform, Nanni had to etch his fury into a piece of rock, and have it hand-delivered — presumably at considerable danger and expense — to make sure Mr Nasir knew exactly how he felt.
The surprisingly contemporary artefact has become an online meme: see some of the silly and wonderful online mockery Mr Nasir inspired here and here.
It certainly drew me in as a Magpie subject: there’s a charm in bringing together the crossword and the meme, two activities associated with such different generations. Most memes are too ephemeral to be easily referenced: but with a listing in the British Museum and the Guinness Book of Records, I felt the Ea-Nasir tablet could be the exception. Even those who’d never encountered it before would have somewhere reputable to look it up.
The topic also lends itself nicely to becoming a crossword: it’s concerned with two things, money and copper, that have a number of synonyms. The five “money” words are entered reversed, as Nanni asks for his money back; the five “copper” words, being poor quality, are jumbled. It also takes place in UR, that briefly-named city that pops up so frequently in cryptic clues, which is where the tablet was found (and where the infamous trader-swindler appears to have lived). That BRITISH MUSEUM is 13 letters, the usual size of a cryptic grid, is simply another happy coincidence.
If I had really persevered with perfectionism, I’d have made the final highlighting a thematic shape: ideally a letter of Akkadian cuneiform, the script in which, Wikipedia tells me, the tablet is written. Sadly all the letters of that alphabet seem a bit awkward to fit into a crossword grid, all fiddles and arrowheads, so I settled for a meaningless, if symmetric, series of straight lines.
Based on the comments I’ve seen, it’s not the most sophisticated of the puzzles that appeared in the April edition, so as ever I am left in awe of those setting and solving these feats of complexity, but I hope Record provided some diversion on the way there.
May 10th, 2024 at 8:14 am
It was a fantastic crossword and inspired us to visit the original in the British Museum this week – it’s smaller than I expected and that it has survived 4000 years is amazing.
May 10th, 2024 at 4:10 pm
I heard the same from another solver! There must be a queue to see it right now.