Bonus Ancient Reddit thread:
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2026
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The people of ancient Egypt undoubtedly had a vernacular culture as rife with jokes, in-jokes and miscellaneous stupid shit as any online forum. Most of it presumably didn’t make it into stone or papyrus, and even if it did, with its context being long gone, we wouldn’t get it.
Apparently archaeologists discovered a transcription of an ancient Sumerian joke, which requires a lot of explanation to even imagine that it could have been funny. A hypothetical ancient Egyptian meme would probably be a bunch of hieroglyphs, a scholarly annotation explaining that they don’t make sense, and some hypotheses on what’s actually happening, possibly with wild speculations tenuously linking it to the handful of surviving texts and inscriptions we have to go on.
You just had to be there
They also had hieroglyph hentai, 3000 years old:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turin_Erotic_Papyrus