Archaeologists Unearth Oldest ‘Shimon Peres Is So Old’ Joke

The new discovery pushes back the currency of the trope a further four hundred years, making it almost as old as Peres.

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Mareisha, Israel, June 24 – Researchers excavating a site from the period of the Biblical King David have discovered what many are calling the oldest yet reference to Shimon Peres as ridiculously old.

Last month, archaeologists digging at this ancient Israelite border town found a stone fragment etched with what appeared to be Hebrew script. They have so far been unable to locate other pieces of what was obviously a larger stone tablet, but the fragment that does exist clearly features the words, “since Shimon Peres was a boy,” a phrase that the scientists say has always been used jocularly. Previously, the phrase had been documented in Byzantine, Roman, and Hasmonean times, with possible occurrences in the First Temple period, which ended in 586 BCE. The new discovery pushes back the currency of the trope almost four hundred years, making it almost as old as Peres.

Professor Al Tekacker of Tel Aviv University is leading a team of researchers excavating a portion of the storied site at Tel Mareisha, a few kilometers southwest of the town of Bet Shemesh. During the period from which the fragment hails, the area was an important frontier with the Philistines, and recent years have seen numerous archaeological discoveries bolstering the Biblical picture of the early Davidic kingdom as more than the backwater tribal chiefdom that has long held sway as the dominant assumption of Biblical archaeology. Peres himself praised the find, saying he remembered being taunted for his age and infirmity as he walked through the town during King David’s reign.

“I’m happy the archaeologists have found more evidence of things I witnessed myself,” said the retired president.

Until now, the oldest confirmed Shimon Peres mention came from the mid-Second Temple period, in the second century BCE, after the establishment of the Hasmonean kingdom under the Maccabees. A fragment excavated from a Jerusalem site in the 1970’s bore an inscription blessing a married couple, with the wish that the man and woman stay together “longer than Shimon Peres has lived.” Later, more frequent references, occurred as the centuries progressed, with prevalence declining in the early Middle Ages as both the man and the joke got too old to matter.

The Renaissance brought a renewed interest in ancient material, and the Shimon Peres joke was dusted off. William Shakespeare is widely regarded as making the most prominent joking reference to Peres of the last six hundred years. In Act II, Scene 7 of As You Like It, the character Jacques says, “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” Mentions of Peres, in jest or otherwise, then fell into disuse until archaeology came into its own in the nineteenth century, when the majority of the known ancient Peres jokes were unearthed.