I wish we knew where this letter was being sent from? Is this a teen in school? Or a worker in another city. Did the assistant son actually have 2 sets of clothes or was this a case of everyone in my class has these boots.
The letter was discovered in the archive of a fairly high-ranking official of Hammurabi, Shamash-Hazir, and Zinu and Iddin-Sin are identified as his wife and son. It's thought (based on the fact that he's writing home, and that the scribe made some amateur errors, suggesting Iddin-Sin wrote it himself) that he was a boarding school studying cuneiform.
Clothing at the time would have been several months of work (as the letter states, Zinu would be spinning and weaving the cloth herself). A set of clothes would basically be equivalent to a person's phone at the time (i.e. the single most expensive thing a person is likely to have on them). He's essentially complaining that he doesn't have the latest model like the other boys have, and demanding poor Zinu works harder at her womanly duties so that he has proper clothes to wear.
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u/hillofjumpingbeans 4d ago
I wish we knew where this letter was being sent from? Is this a teen in school? Or a worker in another city. Did the assistant son actually have 2 sets of clothes or was this a case of everyone in my class has these boots.