A 3,800-year-old woman once wrote a frustrated letter to her husband complaining about a debtor

(Image credit: UHH/K.Helmholz) The struggle to recover money someone owes you is familiar, even if the person on the other end of the transaction lived thousands of years ago. Imagine the disappointment of a woman instructed by her husband to retrieve silver he was owed, who, upon failure, penned her frustration in a letter addressed to him.For Anna-anna, who lived nearly 4,000 years ago in ancient Anatolia, this was precisely what happened. She wrote to her husband, Ennum-Aššur, a merchant who travelled across cities for business in central Anatolia. The message, etched on a cuneiform tablet, was brought to light by researchers at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures at the University of Hamburg. But perhaps an even more intriguing detail is that the researchers managed to discover the contents of the letter without ever opening the clay envelope that had protected it for millennia.In an article on the technology used to access the letter, the CSMC reported that, while Ennum-Aššur was conducting business in central Anatolia, he had asked his wife to recover silver he was owed by a fellow merchant, Laqēpum. However, when Anna-anna approached the debtor, he refused to han...