THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE ARABIAN GULF

EA-NASIR, THE DILMUN MERCHANT

In the reign of Rim-Sin (1822–1763 BC), one of the kings of the Elamite
dynasty which ruled the kingdom of Isin-Larsa, there flourished in the city of
Ur, for centuries one of the most important of the Sumerian trade centres, a
member of the guild of Dilmun merchants whose name was Ea-Nasir. The
guild, the Alik Tilmun as it came to be called in the Babylonian form, consisted
of those merchants who, trading on their own behalf down the Gulf, based
their trans-shipment business on Dilmun’s prosperous and hospitable quays.
By a fortunate chance an extensive correspondence, if it is sometimes anxious
and acrimonious, between Ea-Nasir and his business associates survived in
the ruins of his house in Ur, to which he had withdrawn in the hope of
enjoying a prosperous retirement after his evidently not wholly scrupulous
business career.34 He was active in business around the turn of the nineteenth
century BC.
It is, incidentally, important to recognize that this particular trade, of which
we have relatively detailed knowledge, was between Dilmun and Ur. There
may well have been other merchants of the status of the Urites who dealt
with Dilmun but nothing is known of their organization, if any such existed.
Ea-Nasir was a substantial dealer in copper, a wholesaler of copper ingots;
sometimes he dealt in finished products made from the metal and, indeed, in
anything else from which he could see the chance of a profit.
Amongst the mass of often tedious, but historically very important
cuneiform commercial correspondence which survives inscribed on tablets
of baked clay, Ea-Nasir’s letters gleam mischievously, for much of what
survives of his archives may be categorized as ‘dunning tablets’ from his
creditors, often expressed in those terms of hurt surprise and reproach
which would be familiar to many a debtor today. Ea-Nasir, the first part of
whose name is the Semitic or Babylonian form of Enki, was obviously
considered a reasonably good risk at the outset, judging by the amounts
which he was advanced; the records credit him with substantial borrowings
in copper. Evidently at the outset of his career he was acting for the
palace, buying and selling on the king’s behalf. But later there appears a
series of sharp and sometimes rather petulant cries of financial anguish
directed to him by his backers in Ur whilst he is away in Dilmun. The
usual formal injunction ‘Speak to…’ precedes the text of most of the letters,
indicating that in all probability neither the sender nor the recipient was
literate. A letter, in fact, was known as ‘a say to them’ and was written and
read by professional scribes who thus themselves became men of influence
and power, privy as they were to all the commercial and political secrets
of the time.
Nanni is particularly hurt at Ea-Nasir’s casual, even discourteous,
attitude: after all, are not both of them gentlemen and surely they should
behave as such?

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Speak to Ea-Nasir; thus says Nanni. Now when you had come you
spoke saying thus: ‘I will give good ingots to Gimil-Sin’ this you said to
me when you had come, but you have not done it: you have offered
bad ingots to my messenger, saying ‘If you will take it, take it, if you
will not take it, go away.’ Who am I that you are treating me in this
manner—treat me with such contempt? and that between gentlemen
such as we are! I have written to you to receive my purse but you have
neglected it—who is there among the Dilmun traders who has acted
against me in this way?35

Sumerian and Babylonian businessmen frequently demonstrate a strong

sense of their own gentility and deplore the absence of it in their
correspondents. They were, in fact, right to do so. The status of ‘gentleman’
was defined at law, certainly in Hammurabi’s time. It was, for example,
considerably more expensive, in terms of the compensation which had
to be paid, to wound a gentleman than it was to injure a commoner or a
slave.
In another letter Nanni seems to resent the fact that Ea-Nasir has removed
a quantity of silver from his house and now ‘you make this discussion’.36 He
is worried too that he and others have sworn as to the legality of the contract
in the temple of Shamash. The sun-god was traditionally the witness of all
such oaths, thus rendering them sacred, and he had a special care of merchants.
In a hymn of praise to the god it is said of him, ‘The merchant with his
pouch, thou dost save from the flood.’ Abituram follows, more concisely
and with the threat that he will call in Ea-Nasir’s mortgages; Abituram, wisely
one feels, had actually pinned Ea-Nasir down in writing. Nigga-Nanna, the
bearer of a name that it would be difficult to take seriously today no matter
how much one might owe him, makes the first of his several appearances.
‘The silver and its profit give it to Nigga-Nanna… I have made you issue a
tablet. Why have you not given the copper? If you do not give it, I will bring
in your pledges.37
Exasperation dominates the opening of the next letter, still as curt in its
address to Ea-Nasir as the others have been: ‘Speak to Ea-Nasir: thus says
Abituram. Why have you not given the copper to Nigga-Nanna?’ He ends on
a kinder note, but still with a plea for his copper: ‘The work you have done
is good…. The copper…give it to Nigga-Nanna.’38
The next is no doubt familiar to the modern reader, for it gives the
impression of a weary banker dismissing a tiresome client:

Speak to Ea-Nasir: thus says Imqui-Sin. May Shamash bless your life.
Give good copper under seal to Nigga-Nanna. Now you have had one
issue ten shekels of silver. In order that your heart shall not be troubled
give good copper to him. Do you not know how tired I am? And when
you arrive with Itsu-Rabi take it away and give it to Nigga-Nanna.39

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Nanni’s place in the correspondence is now taken by Appa, who has the
same sort of problem with Ea-Nasir and who also wants, slightly improbably,
a copper kettle.

Speak to Ea-Nasir: thus says Appa. The copper of mine, give it to Nigga-
Nanna—good copper in order that my heart shall not be troubled…and
one copper kettle which can hold 15 qa of water, and 10 minas of other
copper send to me. I will pay silver for it.40

Ea-Nasir evidently has a partner, Ilsu-ellatsu, for one of the letters is

addressed to them both. Another, a rather cagey one in which Ilsu-ellatsu
seems to be worried that his partner will upset the client, is addressed by
him to Ea-Nasir.

Speak to Ea-Nasir: thus says Ilsu-ellatsu, with regard to the copper of

Idin-Sin. Izija will come to you. Show him 15 ingots so that he may
select 6 good ingots and give him these. Act in such a way that Idin-Sin
will not become angry.41

It would be agreeable to think that in the end Ea-Nasir honoured all his
commitments and lived happily ever after with the other financiers of Ur on
the profits of the Dilmun copper trade. He appears again, this time in the
garment business, a very profitable export line to Dilmun and one which it is
difficult not to feel was particularly suited to the egregious Ea-Nasir.
Unhappily, all may not have gone well with Ea-Nasir in the long run.
According to Woolley, who excavated his house at Ur, part of it was
incorporated into the house next door at the end of the Isin-Larsa period
when Ea-Nasir lived and flourished hopefully.42 In Ea-Nasir’s private records,
Woolley found evidence of a diversity of interests and a variety of commercial
involvement to a degree which would impress a modern entrepreneur. Land
speculation, real estate, usury and second-hand clothing were all, apparently,
grist to Ea-Nasir’s mill.
His ambition, however, seems to have outrun his ability, at least in Woolley’s
view, and to have forced on this agile and adventurous merchant a significant
reduction in his standard of living and in the size of his house. At this distance
in time, it is probably merely sentimental to hope that part of Ea-Nasir’s
house was incorporated into his next-door neighbour’s residence because
his neighbour offered him a good price for it.
It is to Woolley that we owe the location and layout of Ea-Nasir’s house in
Ur, at the time of Rim-Sin. Woolley was a splendid excavator and a perceptive
archaeologist: he was also often idiosyncratic. When he published the results
of his epoch-making researches at Ur, so much more remarkable than the
findings of the burial of Tutankhamun in the same period (the 1920s), Woolley
produced a clear and precisely drawn street plan of the city as it was in Ea-

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Nasir’s time. For some reason he chose to give the streets, or at least the
principal ones, the names of the streets of Oxford where he had been an
undergraduate (a contemporary of T.E.Lawrence) in the early years of the
century. This produces some curious consequences: Ea-Nasir’s address thus
becomes 1 Old Street; after his house was combined with his neighbour’s it
became 7 Church Lane. It would be a courageous archaeologist today,
incidentally, who would inscribe two lanes on his city plan as Gay Street and
Straight Street respectively,43 even if he had been at Oxford.
It is easy to be amused by the bickerings and craftiness of these ancient
businessmen whose attitudes, behaviour and even language are so totally
those of their modern successors. Yet it must not be forgotten that to the
immediate predecessors of Ea-Nasir and his companions, one of the supreme
and most glorious achievements of the human race is due.
As far back as the middle of the fourth millennium, trade in Sumer had
achieved such proportions that those engaged in it required the means to
record their sales and purchases and the stocks of goods and animals which
they maintained. From the system which they developed, the earliest known
examples of which are baked tablets from Gilgamesh’s city of Uruk and from
Kish, dated roughly 3500 BC, all writing, so far as we know, descends. From
its earliest form, when it was little more than the association of symbols of
quantity with the representation of the object concerned, writing quickly
evolved to become a sophisticated and flexible instrument for recording not
merely the number of sheep a temple possessed, but the aspirations, fears
and delights of men. By the early centuries of the third millennium a formal
literature already existed which culminated in the story of Gilgamesh’s quest,
perhaps the most moving and majestic of all the legends of antiquity; but it is
wholly in character with the Sumerians that one of the earliest phonetically
written words should be dam-gar, ‘a merchant’.
Ea-Nasir, the Dilmun merchant, was clearly more concerned with profit
than with poetry. But he has his modest place in the line which runs from the
archaic scribes of Uruk and Kish, through the spiky elegance of Sumerian
cuneiform and all the written languages of the world to Virgil, Dante and
Shakespeare.
Agreeable though it is to associate Ea-Nasir and his colleagues with poets
and poetry, it is only part of the story; arguably, it is not the most important
contribution which such ancient commercial enterprises made to human
progress and development. Before the creation of armies, a relatively late
development, the social and cultural character of one land was most likely to
be influenced by another through trade and the contacts and exchanges
which it brought about. Merchants were, of necessity, travellers, by nature
observant and keen to take advantage of any opportunity which might present
itself. Finding a society less developed than that from which they themselves
had come, they could introduce new ideas, new ways of doing things, even
new beliefs and religious practices. This must have been especially true

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when there was something, metal perhaps or timber, that they wanted from
a less sophisticated land. From those countries that had developed crafts,
they brought goods which they had bartered, leaving behind the products of
other lands which in turn exercised their influence and contributed to change
and progress.
From the earliest times this traffic had extended far across the known
world. It is to the merchants, and probably in particular to the seafaring
merchants, that much of the credit must go for the bringing of the arts of
civilization to backward lands and not, as so many legends would have it, to
gods such as Enki or, in Egypt, to the followers of Horus, unless they too
combined business with divinity.
Writing is one thing; the immediate, day-to-day responsibilities of running
a business quite another. It is clear that few merchants were themselves
literate: each firm would have had scribal staff members who were responsible
for the archives and for the management of the firm’s correspondence. The
production of literary texts could be left to the temple scribes or to ladies of
a literary turn of mind, like Sargon the Great’s daughter who was a High
Priestess in Uruk in the twenty-fourth century BC, and was given to occasional
composition.

SEALS AND SEALINGS

For the ordinary affairs of the businesses on which so much of the prosperity
of Sumer and Dilmun was founded, a technique other than the laborious,
labour-intensive and no doubt costly process of scribal composition was
devised: the practice of marking merchandise, documents or other movable
property with the impression of a design cut into the face either of a cylinder
or of a stamp seal. The latter form, the stamp seal, is one of the special glories
of the Gulf cities. Its use made general literacy unnecessary for, whilst it
might be difficult for a hard-pressed merchant or his assistants to decipher a
written text, anyone could recognize a design, their own or another’s, whose
repetition would make it familiar very quickly. Before the various caches of
Dilmun seals from Bahrain and other sites in the Gulf are described, it may
be appropriate to consider more generally the purpose of seals in antiquity,
for they are amongst the most enduring objects frequently to survive from
these remote times. They are of special appeal to those who approach the
ancient world from what is nowadays perhaps an outmoded and
unfashionable humanistic standpoint, for they are highly personalized objects,
most of them unique and hence attributable to a single ownership.
Man has an interesting tendency to seek mechanical solutions to any
problem that confronts him. In central Anatolia, at Çatal Hüyük in the seventh
and sixth millennia before the present era, he seems, remarkably enough, to
have devised a method for the repeated impression of stylized designs by

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