Not to be that guy but that’s basically what most of the carvings in Pompeii are. Shitposts, making fun of people or dumb jokes. Pretty entertaining that people are historically whimsical.

A meme is any unit of cultural information.

So they all actually are memes.

I mean, a lotta them are about cats. So… 🤷‍♂️

Bonus ancient Reddit thread:

Emojis are modern-day hieroglyphs.

The people of ancient Egypt undoubtedly had a vernacular culture as rife with jokes, in-jokes and miscellaneous stupid shit as any online forum. Most of it presumably didn’t make it into stone or papyrus, and even if it did, with its context being long gone, we wouldn’t get it.

Apparently archaeologists discovered a transcription of an ancient Sumerian joke, which requires a lot of explanation to even imagine that it could have been funny. A hypothetical ancient Egyptian meme would probably be a bunch of hieroglyphs, a scholarly annotation explaining that they don’t make sense, and some hypotheses on what’s actually happening, possibly with wild speculations tenuously linking it to the handful of surviving texts and inscriptions we have to go on.