http://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2008/03/10/worlds-oldest-animation-5200-years-old/

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.

According to an article in the Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies:

The artefact bears five images depicting a wild goat jumping up to eat the leaves of a tree, which the members of the team at that time had not recognised the relationship between the pictures.

Several years later,Iranian archaeologist Dr Mansur Sadjadi, who became later appointed as the new director of the archaeological team working at the Burnt City discovered that the pictures formed a related series.

The bowl has some controversy associated with it. Some researchers claimed the tree on the bowl to be the Assyrian Tree of Life, but the bowl dates to a period before the Assyrian civilization.

Tip of the old scrub brush to Kris’s Archaeological Blog at About.com:

Now this is deeply cool. 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.

Bugs Bunny has nothing to worry about yet, if you ask me.

so is icecream and yakhchal lol

Yea, I saw that three four years ago and almost shit my pants!

Abji

Not ice cream in the modern sense; they would take snow from the mountains and add moraba to it; kind of like falude.

well its the thought that counts

they put the idea in other nations minds lol

Very true :)

From Iran it spread to China, and from China it was where the colonialist Europeans adapted the idea.

So qere kamaret ro beriz o az azhdadamun eftexar kon!

Oh god, I haven't tasted fâlude since I was 6! Why did you have to bring that up, haha

salam farda tavalodame

arian pasho boro

tehran jeles

and go to akbar mashties bastany forooshy lol

they have faludeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee :d

Really?! :-P I'll be there August this year :-D