Bonus Ancient Reddit thread:
A meme is any unit of cultural information.
So they all actually are memes.
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2026
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Bonus ancient Reddit thread:
I mean, a lotta them are about cats. So... 🤷♂️
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.
we wouldn’t get it.
You just had to be there
Emojis are modern-day hieroglyphs.
Not to be that guy but that's basically what most of the carvings in Pompeii are. Shitposts, making fun of people or dumb jokes. Pretty entertaining that people are historically whimsical.
I was curious about who that cartouche is talking about, and it might be Cleopatra VII (or 𓈎𓃭𓇋𓍯𓊪𓄿𓂧𓂋𓏏𓄿𓆇), but I'm not sure.
Sadly my knowledge of Egyptian is limited to spotting proper names.