An ancient Sumerian Joke
My husband recently came across an ancient joke and told it to me. It was etched onto a tablet around 1700 BCE in the Old Babylonian Empire and excavated in the 19th century.
It goes like this:
A dog entered into a tavern and said, ‘I cannot see anything. I shall open this.’
Huh.
Did it make you laugh? Well, it definitely made me laugh, but not because I understand it!
Apparently, it is considered the first written ‘So and so walked into a bar’ joke, so it’s nice to see that we as a human race haven’t progressed too far in the last almost 4000 years, haha.
But actually, as with all things from history, it’s a bit more complicated than that.
Some historians translate the ‘joke’ a little differently, others suggest it could in fact be a proverb that we can’t understand today because it refers to someone or a place that was well-known at the time, or is a play on words and pronunciations, or a pun that doesn’t translate to the present.
Interesting.
Other ancient jokes
Reading this strange little joke obviously (because it’s me, haha!) sent me down a rabbit hole to discover other ancient jokes, and you know what I learned?
We humans have loved stupid toilet humour and sex jokes since the dawn of time. We really haven’t changed even a little!
Here are some other ancient jokes. Beware, they are all bawdy and stupid.
These are all taken from this article:
This a saying of the Sumerians, who lived in what is now southern Iraq and goes: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.”
A 1600 BC gag about a pharaoh, said to be King Snofru — “How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.”
The oldest British joke dates back to the 10th Century and the Anglo-Saxons — “What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before? Answer: A key.”
Are you perhaps sensing a theme?
Charming stuff, right?
Personally, my favourite is the mysterious Sumerian bar joke about the dog (though to be honest, even that one has been theorised to be about a brothel, so is very on theme with all the others!).
Yuck!
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PJ Nwosu writes dark mystery novels set in epic fantasy worlds.
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