Really Old Jokes
Sometime recently I posted something and called it an "old joke". Well, that was nothing. Now I've gotten a glimpse of really old jokes, thanks to John J Emerson's "700-year-old Syriac Jokes" (and his participation in the History Blog Carnival).
Find out, for instance, why the rooster lifts one leg when it crows, or why the ewe had to be stoned. Perhaps they lose something in the translation, but you can't deny the humor in the Victorian name of the scholar who did the orignal translating: E. A. Wallis Budge, author of The Chronography of Gregory Abu Faraj the Son of Aaron, The Hebrew Physician Commonly Known as Bar Hebraeus (2 vols. Oxford, 1932).