It is incorrect to say, as my esteemed colleague does, that we know almost nothing of Ea-Nāṣir, esteemed merchant of the mystical Orient. We have much of his correspondence left to us; most of it is just unpublished. Here for example is the translation of a copy of another letter, from Ea-Nāṣir to one Shumun-Libshi, concerning Ea-Nāṣir's somewhat alarming associates Erissum-Matim and »Mr. Shorty«, a letter whose exhortations are at once unsurprising and illuminating.
We know, also, why we have these letters, and why a 3800-year-old clay tablet is still in good shape. You wouldn't think they would be, because this type of correspondence was normally just pressed into clay bricks allowed to dry, which don't last nearly as long. But! Ea-Nāṣir, for reasons which again seem to illustrate his character, kept all his shady-business correspondence under the floorboards of his house — okay, that's actually less abnormal than it sounds, that was a common storage space in ancient Mesopotamia, even though people didn't normally stack their masses of heavy brick-ass letters down there — and then his house burned down, baking the clay tablets into the harder, more resilient fired form which endures the chipping tooth of Time. This fire, of course, reveals instantly to the reader's inner eye a plethora of entertaining possibilities: did someone finally get fed up and burn his house down? Or did he torch it himself as an ancient Mesopotamian insurance fraud, or to eliminate some incriminating evidence?
Again I repeat, we have a pile of these tablets. Ea-Nāṣir is a gift that could keep on giving.