An Ancient Sumerian Dog Joke Becomes
Popular on Twitter


Taylor Jones

Illustration from A series of original Portraits and Caricature Etchings by J. Kay, with
biographical sketches and illustrative anecdotes, Edinburgh, 1877 via The British Library

ur-gir15-re ec2-dam-ce3 in-kur9-ma
nij2 na-me igi nu-mu-un-du8
ne-en jal2 taka4-en-e-ce

A dog entered a tavern and said: ‘I can’t see a thing. I'll open this one!’
This joke, written in cuneiform on a clay tablet,
became briefly popular on Twitter in 2022 for its absurdist non-sequitur humor.
But it is only absurdist because we aren’t living in ancient Sumer
and thus have lost all the context in which we might understand it.

Perhaps the joke was mocking a public figure for something they’d done
or referencing a word or custom we have no record of.
Maybe you had to be there.
If we’d been there, we might have drunk beer out of a shared vessel
with straws made of reeds.
We might have thanked Ninkasi, the goddess of beer, for her work
as we laughed.

I feel a camaraderie with the ancient Sumerians 
when I consider humor as a bridge across time.
Today, we can’t get this ancient Sumerian dog joke.

But it appears that even in the first taverns we ever built, 
if a dog walked in
whatever happened next would probably be funny.


Taylor Jones writes fiction and poetry about the possible future and the impossible present. Her short fiction, nonfiction, and art have appeared inDreamForge, Reckoning, Interstellar Flight Press, and Barren Magazine, and her poetry has appeared in Spit Poet Zine, Tiny Spoon Literary Magazine, Smoky Quartz, and South Broadway Ghost Society. She lives in Denver, Colorado, in a house full of plants. Links to her work can be found here.