A new look at the three best-known examples of Babylonian humour prompts a revised edition of one text, the Tale of Ninurta-pāqidāt's Dog Bite, and gives an opportunity to present significant new collations of the other two, At the Cleaners, and the Tale of the Poor Man of Nippur.

This text, inscribed on a Neo-Babylonian tablet excavated in a private house at Uruk, is the most recently discovered of the comic tales that are the subject of this paper. It was first published by Antoine Cavigneaux in 1979. At that time not all the text was properly understood, though the gist of the story was clear: a man of Nippur is healed by a priest at Isin, and invites him to Nippur to be his guest. On arriving at Nippur the priest follows his patient's instructions but misunderstands what is said to him by a gardener woman and, in doing so, causes such offence that he is driven out of the city. A second translation of the text was made in 1986, by Erica Reiner. Her study of its literary structure threw new light on the nature of the humour, but she had little new to offer in the way of decipherment of the parts of the text that were not already fully understood.

Cavigneaux rightly saw the text to be a story that belongs to the “Schulmilieu”. My interest in the tale stems from my own schooldays, as it were, for I first read it as a student with my teacher, Professor W. G. Lambert. Two significant improvements in the understanding of the text came of that experience. Reading it recently with students of my own, along with the other texts discussed in this paper, encouraged a new appraisal of the tale and its problems, and at length produced further important breakthroughs in decipherment. Accordingly it has been thought worthwhile to present the entire story in a new edition.