This is the first episode of a two-part series on the origin of jokes and humor. Listen to part two here. This episode originally aired on August 5, 2022. In the late 1800s, archeologists in Iraq ...

"The tablets are given either in copy or in transcription." "The mass of the ... collection come from Umma and Drehem." - Introd. "Revised transcription of Bedaleś 'Sumerian tablets from Umma'": p.

The Sumerian creation myth can be found on a tablet in Nippur, an ancient Mesopotamian city founded in approximately 5000 BC. The creation of Earth ( Enuma Elish) according to the Sumerian tablets ...

Sometime around 1800 B.C., a Sumerian scholar inscribed a hand-sized clay tablet with a series of cryptic numbers. The unusual tablet, known as Plimpton 322 (below), has provoked years of fevered ...

A federal court ordered the forfeiture of an ancient Sumerian tablet bearing part of the Epic of Gilgamesh in cuneiform script after it determined that the artifact was illegally imported, the Justice ...

Nobody at the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad knows exactly how the stolen Sumerian tablets ended up in Peru. All that authorities in Lima could tell museum officials was that the three hand-size ...

This is the first episode of a two-part series on the origin of jokes and humor. The story appears in podcast feeds under the title, "Jokes, Part I: Sumer Funny, Sumer Not." Listen to part two here.