Perhaps the world's oldest "smile" — a painted flask from 1700 B.C. found in a burial site in Karkemish, an ancient city in modern-day Turkey.
Credit: Turco-Italian Archaeological Expedition at Karkemish

History's 1st Emoji? Ancient Pitcher Shows a Smiley Face

The iconic smiley face may seem like a modern squiggle, but the discovery of a smiley face-like painting on an ancient piece of pottery suggests that it may be much older.

During an excavation of Karkemish, an ancient Hittite city whose remains are in modern-day Turkey near the Syrian border, archaeologists came across a 3,700-year-old pitcher that has three visible paint strokes on it: a swoosh of a smile and two dots for eyes above it.

"The smiling face is undoubtedly there," Nikolo Marchetti, an associate professor in the Department of History and Cultures at the University of Bologna in Italy, told Live Science in an email. "There are no other traces of painting on the flask." [The 25 Most Mysterious Archaeological Finds on Earth]

The team of Turkish and Italian archaeologists found the pitcher, which dates to about 1700 B.C., in what was a burial site beneath a house in Karkemish, Marchetti said. The pitcher was likely used to drink sherbet, a sweet beverage, he told the Anadolu Agency, a Turkish news outlet.

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"It has no parallels in ancient ceramic art of the area," Marchetti told Live Science. "As for the interpretation, you may certainly choose your own."

https://www.livescience.com/59895-oldest-known-smiley-face-emoji.html

It fogures. That annoying happy face had been around probably forever. I’m waiting for archeologists to find one in a cave in France or India (or who knows where).

https://www.ancienthistorylists.com/pre-history/top-10-oldest-art-ever-d...