Your players are faced with an ancient Sumerian curse! However, since the early ancient Sumerian language was only used for recording tax debts, it turns out to actually be an ancient Sumerian bill.
and therefore they need to get hold of some ancient Sumerian coinage and bring it to the ruins of the ancient Sumerian tax office, because the Sumerians had a pleasingly direct way of preventing tax evasion, namely horrifying curses.
well I don’t have any coin but I have these copper ingots, lovely copper ingots, from a very reputable merchant, never heard a word said against him, very thorough with his paperwork, anyway they’re guaranteed pure copper and proper weight, so can I pay my tax with those?
I just want everyone to take a step back for a second and really think about how we’re using the most powerful knowledge tool in history to make jokes about a specific dude who lived almost 4000 years ago.
it’s fuckin wonderful, is what it is.
I’m absolutely thrilled that I took this piece of history and wrote fanfic about it. Just…it’s fantastic when ancient history becomes a modern in-joke.
I kinda want time travel to become a Thing so that someone can go back and visit Ea-nasir just to tell him “hey dude, I’ve got good news and bad news. good news is, congratulations, you’ll be remembered by millions of people around the world for thousands of years after your death! but the bad news is that you’re remembered as a rude dishonest cheating douchenozzle and any time you’re spoken of, it’s as kind of a cross between a cautionary tale and a punchline…”
In before Ea-nasir did nothing wrong.
There are at least a half-dozen Ea-Nasir fics on AO3, and I can not describe how happy that makes me.
Mooncustafer 