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Claim A says the oldest known mom joke was written on a Babylonian tablet. Claim B says the oldest known mom joke was carved into an Egyptian temple wall. Claim A is true, and Claim B is completely made up.
The tablet was found in 1976 by archaeologist J.J. van Dijk, and it is about 3,500 years old. It was written in Akkadian, in cuneiform, in what is now Iraq.
Experts believe a Babylonian student scribbled six riddles on it around 1500 B.C. The handwriting is described as careless, like a bored kid doodling in class.
The subject matter is earthy: sex, beer, and jokes at mom's expense. The mom line is fragmentary, reading roughly "...of your mother is by the one who has intercourse with her. What/who is it?" The punchline is missing, so we only have the setup.
The tablet itself has since vanished. Van Dijk's copy of the text is the reason we know it ever existed, which makes the oldest recorded mom joke a surviving transcription of a lost scrap of schoolyard humor.
As for Claim B, the joke was not found in Egypt and was not carved into a temple. It came from a clay tablet in Mesopotamia.
Think you'd have spotted the real one? Send this to a friend and see if they get it right.
