An Italian team of archaeologists unearthed the bowl goblet in the 1970s from a burial site in Iran’s Burnt City, but it was only recently that researchers noticed the images on the bowl tell an animated visual story.

The oldest cartoon character in the world is a goat leaping to get the leaves on a tree.

The Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts Organization (CHTHO) in Iran has made a short film using the images on a bowl from the Burnt City. The Burnt City (Shar-i Sokhta) is a site in Iran that dates to about 2600 BC, and has seen some decades of investigation. The bowl shows five images of a wild goat leaping, and if you put them in a sequence (like a flip book), the wild goat leaps to nip leaves off a tree.
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thanks for that very interesting

"When I was your age, young man, we didn't have this confounded television. We would gather around and spin the bowl... "

"Psssh, thats so five milleniums ago!"





edited to add: Ok, I'm gonna get coffee now, sorry

That is really amazing...I have a bowl with a chicken and an egg on it, which I will now spin, to see what came first

Does anyone have a picture of the entire vessel (not just the animation)? I'm wondering if it was turned on a potting wheel. If it was, they could have viewed the animation by simply putting it back on the wheel and turning it. They'd need a strobe light, but that isn't exactly rocket age technology.

If you had a second vessel with a hole in the side, put an oil lamp inside, and turned that on another potting wheel, next to the wheel with the animation, you'd get a strobe light. All they'd have to do to watch the animation would be kick the 2 turning wheels at the same time.

What do you expect, sponge bob?

LOL funny.

Great, will you please let us know what your research uncovers? Perhaps i'll be able to sleep again once i have this knowledge!

Very interesting Owls.
Hey kiddies lets all gather around and spin the bowl and watch the goat jump. I bet the kiddies was glued to the bowl for hours watching the goat lol

Ok so the bowl has five images...then why does the animation have eight movements??? Wouldnt the bowl need eight images to make eight movement?? Mabey there was different math back then.


Oh and I still want to know what came first..chicken or the egg?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_or_egg#Genetics

Very cool.

you....
i heard the cartoon carpet on Islamabad,if u touch it,will spread likely alive...is that true? .

true ...........but it will be better if the show us the whole bowl from every angle.
or just go see one

cool the first anime
and its a super goat!!! How cool is that?!!?

ha thats actually pretty cool

Depends where you start .

Owlscrying thank you for the info, its very interesting.

Hahaha, classic! Interesting find though.

i wish they would have just posted the picture of the entire bowl from all the angles. That little animation is misleading. No way they painted the exact surroundings (trees and lines) all the way around the bowl especially the lines on the top and the bottom. They are not parallel or perfectly sized, i doubt they recreated those exact lines all the way around..

and i thought my dads jokes were old

The bowl signifies time cycles or the universe and the goat signifies capricorn which is the 12th zodiac. Well, Capricorn ends on December 21st ... 2012. Holy S##t.

that's funny right there.

ps - the answer is "chicken" by the way

what's the burnt city?

Actually it has nine movements

(just to make it clear )