History & Science Finds

@Antenor : Haha, indeed! Wonderful find. :smiley:

While reading up on jokes across the world and from all over human history for 40k work, I stumbled upon a delightful surprise: Egyptian humour. Apparently the densely populated and hypersocial Nile valley in Egypt have sported a culture of wisecracks and jokesters for almost five millennia, at the very least.

A short extract from this article should be of interest to history lovers around here.

Making fun of oppressive authorities has been an essential part of Egyptian life since the pharaohs. One 4,600-year-old barb recorded on papyrus joked that the only way you could convince the king to fish would be to wrap naked girls in fishing nets. Under Roman rule, Egyptian advocates were banned from practicing law because of their habit of making wisecracks, which the dour Romans thought would undermine the seriousness of the courts. Even Ibn Khaldun, the great 14th-century Arab philosopher from Tunis, noted that Egyptians were an unusually mirthful and irreverent people.

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