Thursday, July 31, 2008

Ancient Fart Joke

Reuters reports that researchers have traced the world's oldest recorded joke--a fart joke--back to 1900 B.C.E. It was a saying among the Sumerians, who resided in what is now southern Iraq.

Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap.

It's been quite some time since I've studied the Akkadian language--the successor to ancient Sumerian, beginning around the second millennium B.C.E.--but I think the joke would have sounded something like this in its original tongue (NB: my translation here attempts to represent the text phonetically for my audience at TRS; obviously, it is not an attempt to reconstruct the text as it would have been read by Sumerians, as their cuneiform writing system is impossible to decipher for those who have not studied the language, and also my keyboard does not have the characters necessary to render the text such):

licunim sutatra mu naka shi ni petikkatra tam triali; tu yu mistress no ppfffttt a dkratanum pruni.

2 comments:

solon said...

I did a double-take when I saw that the organization publishing the story was Reuters and not The Onion.

Good stuff...

Did you follow the link in the article to the top ten oldest jokes?

Oxymoron said...

I followed the link but couldn't find the list. And the site was sooo slooow.