In an 1846 math textbook from the Free Grammar School of King Edward VI, one exercise considers an exchange of 450 bags of potatoes for cash, 15 chests of oranges, and 185 bushels of carrots; the remainder is nuts. The question is posed: “How many bags of nuts did I receive?”

A seventeenth-century rabbinical decision tells of a German town in which wealthy Jewish households kept chickens, while poorer women secretly milked gentiles’ cows early in the morning to sell the purloined milk on the street. One time, some chicks hopped into a tub of milk left on a doorstep and drowned. “Each side suffered a financial loss,” the text reads. “One from the milk, the other from the drowned chicks.”

A fish seller in Kuwait began gluing googly eyes on rotting fishes’ eye sockets in August 2018 in an attempt to make his wares appear fresher; in response, a rival seller began marketing his own fresh fish as “without cosmetic surgery.” The story went viral online, bringing it to the attention of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, which promptly shut the first shop down.

Ottoman humorist Yusuf al-Shirbini of Egypt railed against unfair levies, referring to them as “things being called innovation.” Al-Shirbini quoted scripture: one who brings about “an innovation or provides accommodation for an innovator, upon him be the curse of God.”

One of the most extensive surviving archives of Old Babylonian writing consists of letters sent to Ea-nasir, an eighteenth-century-bc copper merchant from Ur. “You have offered bad ingots to my messenger,” complained one trading partner. “Who am I that you are treating me in this manner?” Another customer appears repeatedly in the archive, each time inquiring about a missing copper shipment. “Do you not know,” he wrote in his third missive, “how tired I am?”