This is the first episode of a two-part series on the origin of jokes and humor. Listen to part two here. This episode originally aired on August 5, 2022. In the late 1800s, archeologists in Iraq ...

A cuneiform clay tablet that has puzzled scholars for over 150 years has been translated for the first time. The tablet is now known to be a contemporary Sumerian observation of an asteroid impact at ...

A clay tablet from the ancient Sumerian city-state of Ur in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) is the oldest known case of a written customer complaint. In the detailed message, a man named Nanni griped to ...

A piece of an ancient clay tablet found in Greece may have something to say about the written word and the people who produced it. Discovered last summer by a St. Louis archeological team that's been ...

What it tells us about the past: This round clay tablet, which is in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford, is one of two dozen examples of ancient Babylonian mathematics ...

A 3,500-year-old clay tablet discovered in the ruins of the library of an ancient Mesopotamian king, then looted from an Iraqi museum 30 years ago, is finally headed back to Iraq.The $1.7 million ...

A 3,500-year-old clay tablet discovered in the ruins of the library of an ancient Mesopotamian king, then looted from an Iraqi museum 30 years ago, is finally headed back to Iraq.The $1.7 million ...

This is the first episode of a two-part series on the origin of jokes and humor. The story appears in podcast feeds under the title, "Jokes, Part I: Sumer Funny, Sumer Not." Listen to part two here.