The British Museum’s Secret Gags: Ancient Artifacts That Are Actually Hilarious
A Tour of History’s Most Unintentionally Funny Stolen Treasures
The British Museum houses millions of artifacts documenting human civilization’s greatest achievements—art, technology, religion, and culture spanning millennia. What the audio guides rarely mention is that our ancestors were absolutely hilarious, whether intentionally or not, and their legacy includes dick jokes etched into stone, passive-aggressive curse tablets, and sculptures that suggest ancient peoples had the same terrible sense of humor we do today. Between the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles lie countless examples of historical comedy, preserved for posterity alongside the serious stuff that historians actually care about.
Ancient Egyptian Humor: Death Was a Laugh Riot
The Egyptian galleries contain elaborate funerary equipment designed to ensure safe passage to the afterlife, which the ancient Egyptians took extremely seriously—except when they didn’t. The Turin Erotic Papyrus, while not on permanent display (cowards), depicts various sexual positions with such exaggerated anatomy that it’s either ancient pornography or ancient comedy, possibly both. Scholars debate its purpose, but let’s be honest: someone drew a cartoon of people having ridiculous sex 3,000 years ago, and that’s either sacred religious art or the world’s oldest dirty joke.
Egyptian tomb paintings occasionally show banquet scenes where guests are literally vomiting from overindulgence, suggesting that ancient aristocrats documented their parties exactly like modern Instagram users, just with more hieroglyphics and less regret. The Museum’s collection includes shabti figures—miniature servants meant to do the deceased’s work in the afterlife—which is either profound religious belief or the ultimate lazy person’s solution to eternal existence.
The Drunken Dinner Party Papyrus
Several papyri in the collection depict Egyptian nobles getting absolutely hammered at dinner parties, complete with servants holding their hair while they vomit. The ancient Egyptians apparently felt this was important enough to preserve forever, proving that documenting your friends’ drunken disasters is a human impulse that predates social media by several thousand years.
Roman Britain: When Comedy Invaded
The Roman Britain galleries showcase the civilizing influence of Roman occupation, including their hilarious graffiti preserved for eternity. The Vindolanda tablets—Roman military correspondence from northern England—reveal that Roman soldiers complained about the weather, mocked each other’s underwear, and generally behaved like bored teenagers stationed in the provinces. One tablet is an invitation to a birthday party, proving that even Roman centurions needed two weeks’ notice and worried about RSVPs.
Roman curse tablets, thrown into sacred springs to invoke divine revenge on personal enemies, represent perhaps the pettiest use of religion in human history. People paid money to curse the person who stole their cloak, wished painful death upon romantic rivals, and generally used the gods as a supernatural complaint department. The tablets are displayed as important insights into Romano-British religious practices, not as evidence that our ancestors were as petty and vindictive as we are, though that’s clearly the subtext.
Erotic Oil Lamps: Functional AND Scandalous
Roman oil lamps in the collection feature sexual imagery ranging from mildly suggestive to anatomically improbable, suggesting that ancient Romans either had extraordinary sexual abilities or terrible understanding of human anatomy. These lamps served practical purposes while also ensuring that every task performed by lamplight carried an air of obscenity—possibly history’s first example of multitasking.
Greek Pottery: The Original Comic Books
Ancient Greek pottery is celebrated for its artistic merit and historical value, carefully documenting mythology, athletics, and daily life. What’s less advertised is that Greek pottery is full of dick jokes, literally. Red-figure vases show satyrs with exaggerated genitalia, symposium scenes with questionable behavior, and mythological figures in compromising positions—all rendered with the same artistic skill used for depicting heroic battles and religious ceremonies.
The Greeks had an entire genre of comedy pottery showing everyday mishaps: men falling off donkeys, merchants being robbed, and students being terrible at their lessons. These vases sat in British Museum storage for years because Victorian curators found them too vulgar for public display, preferring to show only the noble bits of classical civilization while hiding the evidence that Greeks found farts funny.
The Drunken Symposium Series
Multiple vases depict Greek symposia (drinking parties) that inevitably devolved into chaos, with guests vomiting, passing out, and engaging in activities that would definitely get you banned from modern dinner parties. The Greeks documented these scenes not as cautionary tales but as celebration, suggesting they considered getting catastrophically drunk with your friends to be culture worth preserving—a philosophy modern Britain has enthusiastically adopted.
Assyrian Palace Reliefs: Propaganda with Personality
The Assyrian reliefs from ancient Mesopotamia showcase military might and royal power through massive stone carvings of conquests and hunts. Hidden among the propaganda are delightful details: soldiers making rude gestures at enemies, scribes clearly bored during lengthy ceremonies, and what appears to be ancient Mesopotamia’s first “Are we there yet?” complaints carved into royal procession scenes.
One relief shows servants preparing a royal feast with such elaborate detail that you can see them side-eyeing each other, suggesting that palace servants 2,800 years ago had the same passive-aggressive relationship with their jobs as modern hospitality workers. The reliefs were meant to intimidate visitors with displays of power, but close inspection reveals the artists couldn’t resist including small humanizing moments—possibly history’s first example of sneaking jokes past management.
Medieval Marginalia: Monks Gone Wild
The Museum’s collection of illuminated manuscripts reveals that medieval monks, tasked with copying religious texts, frequently decorated margins with absolute nonsense: rabbits jousting, nuns picking penises from trees, and knights fighting giant snails. These images sit alongside sacred text, suggesting medieval scribes experienced such profound boredom that they descended into surrealist fever dreams, or possibly that they understood the fundamental absurdity of existence and expressed it through weaponized snails.
Art historians seriously debate the symbolic meaning of these marginal doodles, proposing complex theological interpretations for what is clearly just monks having a laugh during tedious work. The most straightforward explanation—that spending years copying Latin in a freezing monastery drove people slightly mad—is somehow less accepted than theories about snail warfare representing theological concepts.
The Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog Predates Python
Marginalia frequently depicts rabbits as terrifying warriors, complete with armor and weapons, brutally attacking humans. Either medieval Europe suffered from undocumented giant rabbit attacks, or monks created an elaborate joke about the least threatening animal imaginable, predating Monty Python by 700 years and proving that British humor has always involved making the mundane ridiculous.
The Lewis Chessmen: Historical Side-Eye
The famous Lewis Chessmen, carved from walrus ivory in the 12th century, are masterpieces of medieval craftsmanship. They’re also clearly sick of everyone’s nonsense, with facial expressions ranging from mild irritation to absolute fury. The berserker pieces, biting their shields in rage, perfectly capture the feeling of being stuck in a meeting that should have been an email, while the queens rest their faces in their hands in a gesture of despair recognizable to anyone who’s ever dealt with incompetent colleagues.
These chess pieces weren’t meant to be funny—they’re serious game pieces from serious people—but their expressions are so relatable that they’ve become memes, proving that medieval carvers understood human exasperation at a fundamental level and chose to preserve it in walrus ivory for future generations to appreciate.
African and Oceanic Galleries: Colonial Collecting Meets Cosmic Jokes
The British Museum’s African and Oceanic collections, acquired through colonialism that the museum is increasingly uncomfortable discussing, include plenty of intentionally humorous objects that Victorian collectors completely misunderstood. Fertility figures that were clearly meant to be funny are displayed as “serious ritual objects,” satirical masks are presented as genuine ceremonial items, and various objects with obvious comedic intent are solemnly labeled as sacred artifacts.
The museum’s insistence on interpreting everything as deeply serious—rather than acknowledging that people throughout history made jokes—reflects British colonial attitudes about “primitive” peoples lacking humor or sophistication. In reality, many cultures created deliberately absurd or satirical objects, but admitting this would require acknowledging that the people they colonized were as complex and funny as the colonizers, which apparently remains too difficult.
Why the Museum Doesn’t Advertise the Funny Stuff
The British Museum maintains its reputation as a serious institution of learning by downplaying the humor in its collection. Ancient dick jokes are “fertility symbols,” drunken dinner parties are “symposia documentation,” and medieval monk doodles are “marginal illumination with symbolic significance.” This is partly scholarly obligation—historians must find serious meaning in things—and partly institutional image management, since advertising “Come See Our Ancient Penis Collection” might attract the wrong demographic.
The museum’s audio guides and wall texts carefully navigate around the obvious comedy, preferring to discuss artistic techniques and historical context rather than acknowledging that our ancestors were just as juvenile as we are. This serves the important function of making visitors feel they’re learning something serious rather than just looking at very old jokes, justifying the entrance fee and maintaining the museum’s dignity.
What Ancient Humor Tells Us
The British Museum’s unintentionally funny artifacts reveal that humans have always found the same things amusing: sex, bodily functions, drunken mishaps, and mocking authority. The specific cultural contexts change, but the fundamental human impulse to laugh at inappropriate things remains constant across millennia. Whether it’s ancient Egyptians documenting party vomiting or medieval monks drawing killer rabbits, humor persists as a universal human trait, surviving even the British Museum’s best efforts to make everything serious.
These artifacts matter not despite their humor but because of it, demonstrating that joy, absurdity, and laughter are as central to human civilization as war, religion, and art. The museum’s collection proves that throughout history, in every culture, people found time to laugh—and often enough thought their jokes were worth carving into stone, painting on pottery, or illuminating in manuscripts. That these objects survived while countless serious works disappeared suggests that maybe humor was more important than the serious stuff all along.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!
Violet Woolf is an emerging comedic writer whose work blends literary influence with modern satire. Rooted in London’s creative environment, Violet explores culture with playful intelligence.
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