Sumerian double negative (and fart joke)
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“Something which has never occurred since time immemorial: A young woman did not fart in her husband’s embrace.”
As quoted in Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History (W.W. Norton, 2025), by Moudhy Al-Rashid. This is an excellent introduction to how much we can learn about ancient Mesopotamia from the thousands of cuneiform stamped tablets often just tossed away as building fill.
Searching in The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature for the proverb quoted by Al-Rashid, I found it here:
#15-16: 15-16. Something which has never occurred since time immemorial: a young woman did not fart in her husband's embrace.
| 15. | nij2 ud-bi-ta la-ba-jal2-la |
| 16. | ki-sikil tur ur2 dam-ma-na-ka ce10 nu-ub-dur2-re |
Exacting exegesis by Phil Jones, masterful Penn Sumerologist:
- nij2 ud-bi-ta la-ba-jal2-la
– niĝ ud.bi=TA la.ba.ĝal.a
-thing days.those=from not.SEPARATIVE.to be.RELATIVIZER
– A thing that has not existed from those (primordial) days:
16. ki-sikil tur ur2 dam-ma-na-ka ce10 nu-ub-dur2-re
– kisikil tur ur dam.an(i).ak=A še nu.b.dur.e
– maiden young lap spouse.her.of=in fart not.3rd non-sapient singular.to vent.3rd sapient singular
– a young woman will not be farting in the lap of her husband
The usual negative verbal prefix is nu-, but in line 15, it is replaced by la- when it precedes -ba-
Some of the grammatical terminology is idiosyncratically mine and I use . to separate parts of words or phrases and = to separate phrases from case post-positions
The j and the c in the transliterations hark back to the days of using ASCII in typing Sumerian translits: as j does not appear in Sumerian it could be used for a nasalized g (̂g in my normalization) while c was not needed for /k/ or /s/ sounds and could therefore be used for /sh/; š in my normalization.
The use of c for /sh/ was actually a convention dreamed up by researchers into Sumerian literature; in contrast, those studying Sumerian admin texts used sz (as that combination never occurs in Sumerian). The latter tradition has proven more robust, so if you use the ePSD, you use sz when searching for words with /sh/.
Mirabile dictu!
Selected readings
- "Sumerian and Sinitic" (12/17/23)
- "Pleiades: From Sumer to Subaru" (4/5/22)
- "Sumerian beer" (4/4/22)
- "From Fart Gods to Farting Out One’s Soul: The Historic Ritualization of Farts", Ancient Origins (3/5/18) — this article barely mentions the world's oldest (fart) joke (ca. 1900 BC), about which there are numerous references online, but it does have many citations to fart lore, legend, and learning in antiquity around the world, and it begins with the hilarious masterpiece Hegassen scroll detail. Fart Battle, 1864 (public domain), which powerfully reminds me of the video showing a lone skunk defeating a pack of shocked hyenas (make sure to have your sound turned on and up) with its visible spray (I watched it a dozen times), as in the Japanese painting.
He-gassen (Japanese: 屁合戦, lit. 'Fart competitions'), or Hōhi-gassen (放屁合戦, lit. "Fart fight"), are titles given to a Japanese art scroll, created during the Edo period (1603–1868) by an unknown artist or several unknown artists depicting flatulence humor.
He-gassen is a subject occasionally depicted in Japanese art, first attested at the end of the Heian Period (794–1185). Toba Sōjō (1053–1140), in addition to his famous Scrolls of Frolicking Animals, is also mentioned as having painted scrolls on themes such as "Phallic Contest" and "He-gassen".
(Wikipedia — The entire Wikipedia article is fascinating and well documented, including reference to a digitized scroll of a fart contest held by the Waseda University Library, with courtiers and commoners in attendance.
[Thanks to Keith Barkley]
Ralph J Hickok said,
November 10, 2025 @ 9:18 am
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9U3uqZhQ3E
Scott P. said,
November 10, 2025 @ 11:57 pm
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/dust-in-the-wind
C Baker said,
November 11, 2025 @ 7:31 pm
They say humor doesn't translate….
Michael Watts said,
November 12, 2025 @ 10:34 am
Seems unfortunate. The contrast s/sz exists in other places, but in Hungarian it goes the other way, with "sz" representing /s/, and in Chinese postal romanization ("Szechwan") it seems to represent nothing in particular.
On the fundamentals "sz" is a strange digraph to use for any reason, since the two sounds differ along only one dimension. I feel like digraphs are usually chosen such that each half of the digraph expresses something about the sound. "Ng" is nasal like /n/, velar like /g/, and voiced like both. Mπ is voiced like /m/, non-nasal like /p/, and labially articulated like both.
(Or, "th" is a simple sequence of /t/ followed by /h/, and then it experiences a sound change. In that case, and the case of "ph", the two letters aren't separately meaningful, but that state of affairs only became true after the digraph was chosen – when the orthographic choice was made, each half of the digraph was separately meaningful.)
Michael Watts said,
November 12, 2025 @ 10:43 am
Interestingly, the SMBC comic has an identical translation of the first line, but corrects the second line from "embrace" to "lap". I doubt the author was able to do that correction himself; there must be some other source that corrected the version found in the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature.
While I'm wondering about the Sumerian wording, I'm curious what's going in with the verb(s) in the second line. The glosses say "fart not.3rd non-sapient singular.to vent.3rd sapient singular". Is "not" a verb? Is "fart" a verb? This looks to me like "fart" is the object of "to vent" (compare 发屁), but I have no way to explain why there would be both a 3rd-non-sapient-sg inflection and a 3rd-sapient-sg inflection, and I have difficulty understanding why there would be a non-sapient inflection at all. Surely the subject must be "maiden"?
Philip Taylor said,
November 12, 2025 @ 1:39 pm
Michael — « The contrast s/sz exists in other places, but in Hungarian it goes the other way, with "sz" representing /s/ ». A fact which caused this reader considerable confusion, in that having driven through a number of Slavonic-speaking countries, he ended up in Hungary with intended destination Szombathely. Not in a million years did he expect to have his pronunciation (very helpfully) corrected from /ʃɒm ˈbeɪθ li/ to (approximately) /ˈsom bɒt ˈhɛj/.
Philip Jones said,
November 12, 2025 @ 4:59 pm
@Michael Watts: apologies for the somewhat opaque analysis of the Sumerian: the verbal idiom operates something like "to vent a fart" and the .b. prefix references the non-human (to use the more standard terminology) word še/fart and the final .e sort of references the human word "maiden" (Sumerian verbal suffixes are a bit controversial).
Therefore, the verbal form on its own sort of means "she will not be venting it".
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
November 13, 2025 @ 8:08 am
Yes, but you all are missing the point here — does the Sumerian word for "fart" translate into PIE as "*pesd-" or "*perd-"? The joke works differently depending on which sense is intended…
Jonathan Smith said,
November 13, 2025 @ 10:11 pm
Concurring with C Baker that "I guess you had to be there"…
KeithB said,
November 13, 2025 @ 11:01 pm
I think it is interesting that the idea that "ladies don't fart" is pretty much identical between ancient Sumerian and our culture today. Are there any cultures were ladies and men can fart equally? I was going to say "with abandon", but that was a bridge too far.
KeithB said,
November 13, 2025 @ 11:08 pm
I should point out that the book mentions that this "proverb" was one of many that scribes-in-training would use to learn Sumerian and Cuneiform.
My favorite is "A heart never created hatred; speech created hatred."
Philip Taylor said,
November 14, 2025 @ 7:14 am
"A heart never created hatred; speech created hatred" — is that really true ? When I swear at the radio (an almost daily occurrence these days), it is the anger that first arises, and I then give vent to that anger through speech. But of course, it was the speech of the narrator/presenter/w-h-y that aroused the anger within me, so in that sense speech did indeed create hatred (well, anger), so perhaps the saying is true after all. But if someone so annoys me by their inconsiderate driving that I (temporarily) hate them, then no speech is involved at all …
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
November 14, 2025 @ 8:47 am
KeithB said,
[…] Are there any cultures were ladies and men can fart equally?
—
There may be one out there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He-gassen
KeithB said,
November 17, 2025 @ 9:19 pm
I think the point is that children don't know who to hate until their parents tell them who the "other" is via speech.