Again, a lion is engaged in laying out the dead body of another animal, and a hippopotamus is washing his hands in a water jar.
One of these burlesque pictures shows a soul doomed to return to its earthly home in the form of a pig. This picture, of such antiquity that it deeply impressed the Greeks and Romans, is part of the decoration of a king’s tomb.
The ancient Egyptians, it may be gathered from their humorous pictures, were not averse to looking on the wine when it was red. Several delineations of Egyptian servants carrying home their masters after a carouse, are graphic and convincing; while others, equally so, show the convivial ones dancing, standing on their heads or belligerently wrestling.
The tombs of the ancient Egyptians abound in these representations of over-merry occasions, and it all goes to prove the close connection in the primitive mind of the emotions of grief and mirth.
Yet, The Book of the Dead that monument of Egyptian literature, and the oldest in the world, contains only records of conquests and a few stories and moral sayings,—not a trace of humor. That, in ancient Egypt is represented solely by the ready and deft pencil of the caricaturist.
Though humor came to them later, the earliest records of the Eastern and Oriental countries show little or no traces of the comic.
Indeed eminent authorities state that there is not a single element of the amusing in the art or literature of the Babylonians or Assyrians. It may be that the eminent authorities hadn’t a nose for nonsense, or the statement may be true. We never shall know.
But both these peoples had great skill in drawing and sculpture, and though their records are chiefly historical or religious, we cannot help feeling there may have been some jesting at somebody’s expense.
However, there are no existing records of any sort, and we fear the ancient Assyrians and Babylonians must go down in history as serious-minded folk.