Researchers at the British Museum announced Tuesday that their transcription of a newly excavated cuneiform artifact has been severely delayed by the persistent appearance of a carved, anthropomorphic paperclip offering unsolicited assistance.
The 4,000-year-old clay slab, originally unearthed near the ancient city of Uruk, contains a complex inventory of barley shipments. However, progress on deciphering the Sumerian text ground to a halt last week when a prominent, raised relief of the animated assistant manifested in the lower-right quadrant of the stone, gently tapping the surface and asking if the user was attempting to draft a formal trade decree.
It appears the original Mesopotamian author pressed his reed stylus at an unsupported angle, triggering a hard-coded macro that summoned the assistant.
The researchers noted that earlier attempts to dismiss the assistant by striking the tablet with a bronze chisel only resulted in the paperclip bending into the shape of a bicycle and offering to look up synonyms for "livestock." Excavation records indicate this is not an isolated incident; several nearby potsherds from the same dig site were found completely blank aside from a massive, blinking hourglass symbol.
Microsoft representatives issued a brief statement confirming that the 18th-century BCE artifact is technically running a deprecated build of Word 97. A company spokesperson noted that the tablet's baked-mud architecture lacks the compute necessary to support modern AI features, advising curators to simply ignore the paperclip's persistent recommendations to adjust the margins on the Code of Hammurabi. The software giant also declined liability for any historical data lost when the stone routinely freezes during auto-save procedures.
At press time, the translation team had reportedly evacuated the archives after an intern accidentally brushed the tablet's engraved "Yes" option with a camel-hair duster, causing the entire 600-line historical record to automatically reformat into a two-column brochure layout.