The world's oldest insult has been discovered on a clay tablet and surprisingly, it was intended to teach language as well as morality. Written more than 4,000 years ago in Sumerian, the language of the elite in Acadian society, the insults were used to teach students the language and how to write, as well as ridicule the lazy and foolish. The tablet contains two insults: “Your husband has no clothes to wear. You yourself are wearing such rags that your butt sticks out of them” and “You have the intelligence of a monkey. Your house is like a pigsty. Your living room is like an oven”. The insults were believed to have been written by a student at the behest of a teacher, rather than behind their back. The goal of the Acadian teachers was to teach language and morality, and it seems that they used ridicule as a tool to teach the importance of hard work and intelligence. The insults were written in what is now Iraq a few years before the invention of air conditioning, making the insult “your living room is like an oven” particularly relevant for the time.
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