23 of 100: Ancient letter of complaint

I'm reading this really good novel right now, Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, and in one chapter, the main character's Iranian immigrant father, who happens to work on an industrial chicken farm in Indiana, has the stage. And he's reminiscing about raising his son alone, his wife, the boy's mother, having been killed when the US mistakenly shot down the airplane she was traveling in. "Cyrus," he says, "loved to show me stuff he was learning in his books."

Once, he showed me a picture of an ancient clay tablet, Babylonian or Sumerian, something like that, 4,000 years old. I expected it to be something holy, a poem to a fertility goddess, some ancient fable. But it was, Cyrus told me, just a lengthy complaint from a business transaction about receiving the wrong kind of copper. "The copper is substandard. I have been treated rudely. I have not accepted the copper, but I paid money for it." I never forgot that. Cyrus was laughing of course, he thought it was hilarious. "Ancient one-star review!" he said. I'm pretty sure I didn't even say anything....    
     For weeks, I kept thinking about that tablet. Walking around the shavings, hens running from my boots, the image of that ancient stone hung in my mind. For all our advances in science—chickens that can go from egg to harvest in a month, planes to cross the world, missiles to shoot them down—we've always held the same obnoxious, rotten souls. Souls that have festered for millennia while science grew. How unfair, this copper delivery. How unfair, this life. My wounds are so much deeper than yours. The arrogance of victimhood. Self-pity. Suffocating.   
     Maybe it's because we could pass along science. You wrote a fact in a book and there it sat until someone born five hundred years later improved it. Refined it, implemented it more usefully. Easy. You couldn't do that with soul-learning. We all started from zero. From less than zero, actually. We started whiny, without grace. Obsessed only with our own needing. And the dead couldn't teach us anything about that. No facts or tables or proofs. You just had to live and suffer and then teach your kids to do the same. From a distance, habit passing for happiness.
     Go to work. Dig through shavings, find the eggs. Eat. Clean the eggs. Put down new shavings. Clear the driplines. Go home. Eat with Cyrus. Put on basketball, put on a movie. Drink. Dreamless sleep. Medicine-deep. Go to work. Find the eggs.
     What was there to complain about? A murdered wife? A sore back? The wrong grade copper? Living happened till it didn't. There was no choice in it. To say no to a new day would be unthinkable. So each morning you said yes, then stepped into the consequence.

I quote that at length because it's beautiful writing, and heart-wrenching. And true. But it also got me searching the internet for that Babylonian or Sumerian tablet. No problem to find it. Others had made the same joke about the oldest customer service complaint, including, fittingly, the Guinness Book of World Records. Known as the complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir (𒂍𒀀𒈾𒍢𒅕), a merchant in the Sumerian city of Ur, it was unearthed in the 1920s–30s and dates from c. 1750 BCE. It is about 5 inches high, 2 inches wide, and written in Akkadian, the earliest documented Semitic language. Other tablets were found in the same ruins, all complaining about Ea-nāṣir. I hope the dissatisfied customers got together and found a more reliable copper supplier. Here is the tablet in question. It's beautiful to look at. One can see it in person at the British Museum (making a note for the next time I'm in London).