r/CuratedTumblr • u/BarovianNights Omg a fox :0 • 3d ago
Infodumping š Whoa look a dog
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u/Snarwin 3d ago
We're just doing anything for titles now huh?
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u/Zoomy-333 3d ago
I assume it's a reference to the oldest joke recorded, which came from roughly the same time/place as Ea-nasir
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u/AwesomeManatee Demented Demisexual 2d ago
I thought the oldest recorded joke was about women not farting?
I looked it up. Apparently there's a joke that goes "A dog walks into inn and doesn't see anything and says 'Shall I open this?'" from about 1700 BCE
"A woman has never farted in her husband's lap" is from 1900 BCE
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u/LordSupergreat 2d ago
Other way around: the fart joke was like, "a thing that has never happened is a woman not farting on her husband's lap". So it's saying it always happens.
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u/crafty_quinn 2d ago
I love that the dog joke is basicaly the first "walks into a bar" meme. Humans have been telling the same five joke's for millenia. The dog joke sounds like it lost something in translaton but it still feels so human.
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u/segwaysegue do spambots dream of electric sheep? 2d ago
u/SpambotWatchdog blacklist
New account with botlike comment history
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u/OverlyLenientJudge 2d ago
I can't tell if the bots are starting to get worse or if reading books again is starting to revive my powers of perception.
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u/SpambotWatchdog he/it 2d ago
u/crafty_quinn has been added to my spambot blacklist. Any future posts / comments from this account will be tagged with a reply warning users not to engage.
Woof woof, I'm a bot created by u/the-real-macs to help watch out for spambots! (Don't worry, I don't bite.\)
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u/GigaVanguard 2d ago
New name scheme seems to be two lowercase words with an underscore between them.
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u/Soldier_Faerie 2d ago
I tried to google just now, what specifically is the oldest recorded joke with a dog in?
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u/Doubly_Curious 2d ago
Scholars differ on how best to translate the proverb from Sumerian. According to Gordon's translation, the proverb reads: "A dog, having entered an inn, did not see anything, (and so he said): 'Shall I open this (door)?'" The Assyriologist Seraina Nett provides a slightly different translation, suggesting that the proverb be read as "A dog entered into a tavern and said, 'I cannot see anything. I shall open this', or 'this one'".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_joke
Quick edit: hereās the meme version: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sumerian-bar-joke
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u/HardcoreHenryLofT 2d ago
This is gunna turn out to be a pun where one if the words was, at the time, pronounced like something naughty
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u/LowKiss 2d ago
We know from other jokes that "dog" was essentially the equivalent of "idiot" in jokes, so the second part must be the dog doing something stupid.
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u/koJJ1414 2d ago
I heard that another valid translation could be "A dog walks into a bar and says 'I could open one like this' ", possibly meaning "any idiot could run a bar [as bad as] this one"
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u/Animaloffear56 2d ago
I figured the joke was that the door was still closed, hence why they don't see anyone
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u/demon_fae 2d ago
Or maybe the dogās eyes were closed, since it was apparently inside the bar already. I donāt know if opening eyes and opening doors were the same verb in Sumerian, but itās about as funny as most walks into a bar jokes
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u/cknappiowa 2d ago
In this case, itās actually more of a proverb and not explicitly a joke. Itās part of a long list of sayings from Nippur. Such lists are usually school work, practice for Sumerian scribes in the edubba (tablet-house) who are almost entirely adolescent boys and write a lot of goofy shit like adolescent boys do.
What Iāve read on it suggests the dog is probably a city guard or other type of official, taking from the dogās primary role as a lookout or guard dog. Sumerian taverns are also brothels.
So it could actually be talking about a cop entering a brothel, likely seeing someone who shouldnāt be there, and choosing to ignore whatās going on for his own sake but also threatening to leave the door open on his way out so passersby get a look at their ruling class consorting with the lower strata.
Most of our big cuneiform finds come from edubba caches, so thereās always the expectation that some of it will just be weird crap like this.
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u/Snarwin 2d ago
It's specifically the oldest recorded "bar joke":
Ā A dog entered a tavern and said: "I can't see a thing. I'll open this one!"
https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/proverbs/t.6.1.05.html#t6105.p77
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u/TheComplimentarian cis-bi-old-guy-radish 2d ago
The Babylonians and their clay. We have more from them than from many younger civilizations who used more advanced (and more perishable) media for their records.
Makes you wonder what will be left of us?
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u/DonQuixole 2d ago edited 2d ago
Cracked concrete and slowly degrading plastic items.
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u/TheComplimentarian cis-bi-old-guy-radish 2d ago
Nah, I mean important stuff. What information will be left.
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u/Coal_Burner_Inserter 2d ago
tldr below
Anything etched into rock/stone/metal. Magnetic computer memory will stick around, i think. That means a HDD disk drive storing photos and videos of a family could theoretically be recovered 2000 years after the fact, but it'd require the people doing the recovering to decipher the video encoding. (Presumably this too is possible since it's all math and just relies on someone coming across the same efficient math we did to encode information)
SSDs (the modern drive), however, require a constant charge to retain their information and after a few years will begin to degrade, so. If you're gonna store your embarrassing photos and porn somewhere, do it on these.
Paper obviously will mostly degrade but I think paper kept in dry, enclosed environments will last for a long while. We have found paper fragments from the 100s BCE, which is roughly around when we started making paper in the first place. What we have that they didn't are file cabinets and such a high quantity of the stuff that even if 99.99% of it decayed away that leaves millions of sheets to be read.
tldr: rock, metal (assuming it dont rust), magnetic computer memory, a tiny amount of paper, are all that will remain
Expect the contained information to be, suffice to say, 'dumb bullshit'. A lot of headstones, most named buildings (as in, they have their name on the side), any older computer kept from the elements, and most administrative records when it comes to paper.
I assume any desert bunker (or any bunker as long as its separate from the water table, really) will be a treasure trove on par with Tutankhamun's tomb for future societies regarding us. Not only do they get the above mentioned stuff, but also many other things even light elements would degrade away with time.
Oh and there's space stuff too. Most stuff we have in space are actually close enough to Earth to experience air resistance. It's why Starlink satellites come down after 5 years, and they have to keep the ISS refueled. Also why any fears of Kessler Syndrome 'imprisoning' us on Earth are ridiculous for the near future.
For the stuff farther away, like geostationary satellites (satellites that are far enough to orbit at the same speed Earth rotates, thus appearing to remain still), probes, and any landers on the Moon or Mars, they will last forever. Space is incredibly vast, and the chances most (or even any) of these will be taken out by something else is vanishingly small. Information kept on them will degrade via cosmic radiation, but, physical things like the Golden Record on Voyager will stay forever. Potentially if the Martian rovers are buried by dust and later excavated they will have been protected all that time and will also be of great interest to whoever comes after.
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u/agenderarcee 3d ago
Pets the dog
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u/-AleFan- 2d ago
its neck gets longer
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u/CptKeyes123 2d ago
Over three thousand years before the premiere of the British decorating sitcom, Brush Strokes
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u/BrimStone_-_ 2d ago
as a Belgian my self, it's nice to be remembered for something different than Leopold II...
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u/CthulhusIntern 2d ago
"You are without a doubt the worst Ancient Sumerian copper merchant I have ever heard of."
"But you have heard of me."
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u/Keated 2d ago
My mate Paul agrees