Home -> Articoli -> Giochi

The first toys

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

The first toys.
Going back in the history of ancients cicilizations we discover the first toys which were given to baby in arms and very young children. We find them in temples and in shrines where, once grown up, young people brought them as offers to the gods. Boys did it for their coming of age and girls when they were marrying. Many of those toys were very similar to our modern ones and looking at children plays depicted on the rough ceramic jugs of the Antesteriae we recognize some of our own modern playthings. Apart from those pictures we also find all kind of toys in our excavations and, unfortunately, the places where more often they are, are not in temple or shrines but in the necropolises, festive objects gently put along the spoils of the unfortunate baby, while sculpted on marble coffins we can even see the young ones playing with them,
There is no doubt that to discover playthings in the tomb of children make us look at those object, which were made for joy and pleasure, through a veil of sadness. It is imposible not to feel the grief of whom set his child in the little grave, and the words written by Martial for his little slave girl come back to our mind “be light to her, earth. She was so light to you.”
Unfortunately too often heartbroken parents did repeat this request. In ancient times the death rate of young people was very high, and with an unwavering faith in afterlife the bereaved mothers and fathers put in their children biers also all their most dear passtimes.
Thus in infants’ tomb we find many kind of feeding bottles and nearly all of them belonged to babies whose mother died very soon after their birth. The poor creature could not be raised by breast feeding, thus, due to the scarce hygienic knowledge of the times, they often died. The feeding bottles always looked very festive, all gayly painted and shaped as puppies or piglets, that not only provided heated milk to the little creature, but awoke also their interest, but they could never pass the examination of our hygienic departments.
However there were feeding bottles everywhere and in all the times. Today we find the Carthaginian’ ones kept in the display-cases of Tunis’ Bardo Museum. They are shaped as large visage with a long spout in place of the nose and an handle to keep it well in hand, and always Carthaginian is the mongrel puppy of the Susa Museum, a little dog with a sharp muzzle. In Middle East, in Italy and in Greece we find the more artistic and many coloured Hellenistic ones, as the mouse of Siracuse’s Museum (fig.1), or the one of the end of the Roman Republic displayed at the Museo Nazionale delle Terme di Roma, a fat piglet with a round and fat snout. They all belong to different times and at different epochs and all belonged to motherless babies united by the same fate.
In some of these feeding bottles a little ceramic ball or a pebble was left inside, so that, when the baby had finished to suck his milk, he could be amused by the sound of it. It is normal, because we know that for children the best toys are the noisiest ones, and as our little ones tastes have not changed in all those centuries, even today we make our sons happy by giving them any objects that, if energically shaken or striken with a stick, can fill the house with a lot of noise. In the same manner the childhood of our ancient ancestors was made merrier by a lot of harness bells which very often had animal shapes. We have found them in temples and tombs. Some time they were simplified owls without feets or tail but with their big round eyes open; others were piglets or compact turtles all collected in their shell; there even were some ones made as a baby in his crib. However the most elaborate of all of them was the one representing a boy sitting on a basis and clasping tightly in his arms a goose, while this bird, straining his neck, tried to grasp a fruit which could be seen in the young one’s mantle folds.
Nice harness bells, thus, colored, but above all very noisy When the baby was very small and could not held anything in his little hands, those objects were energetically shaken on the cribs by nurses, older brothers or sisters in the vain hope to calm the little creature purple with rage and furiously kicking. It was a normal practice and highly advised, even prescribed by the wise Pollux, who considered this the best method to put a baby to sleep, and probably it could have been abslolutely right. The little creature, probably dizzy and dazed from the noise, must certainly calm himself and as soon as the noise ended, fall in a good and deep sleep.
When, with the passing of time children were able to keep them in their hand, harness bells were given to them, but probably they were not the same that we find in the tombs: ceramic ones, very easily broken objects that couldn’t stand the first fall. There must have been noisy toys of a different kind, and very strong ones. Harness bells that children received as a gift were surely made of a more strong stuff than ceramic. Probably they were made of wood or bronze and, as a matter of fact, we have the descriptions of one of them written by a certain Philocles who, when coming of age, dedicated all his toys to Hermes and also made a list of them. Among the other things he described a boxwood harness bell.
Other very solid harness bells of those times which were strong and durable and could be confied in the hands of the most awkward and inept child of this world. Many had a long handle and some of them, the metal ones, were made by a series of rings fixed all around the margin of a bronze disk. When shaken the effect was really very strong. There was also another form of harness bell made by a rectangular piece of wood fixed to a long handle. Two other thin pieces of the same stuff were set hanging on the two sides of the central part and arranged in such a way that when the toys was shaken they were hurled very noisily against it.
Of course after thousands of years we can’t find many wooden harness bells because, apart from places with a particularly arid climate as for istance Egypt, the bottom of the sea or towns as Herculaneus, sealed in torrents of mud, wood never survived the centuries. We could certainly expect to find harness bells molded in metals because they won’t decay, but only few of them have been found in the tombs, where, instead of those more durable toys, we usually find the fragile ceramic ones. As it is highly improbable that they could have endured long usage and the tender baby’s hands, the only possible explanation is that they were only ceramic models bought for the funeral and then put in the graves.
Of course in ancient world there were not only feeding bottles shaped like animals and with pebbles inside. There were many other toys for the babies. There were whistles of all kind, and a lot of tinkling amulets, which hanged to the child neck or tied to a shoulder belt (fig.2) , amused him ringing loudly and longly each time he moved and helped the worried parents and nurses to find their charge in every corner he chose to conceal himself. Apart from these useful fulfillments, these amulets were good and powerful charms and had the power to keep away from the child not only any evil eye, but also chase the dangerous bad spirits.


Horses, carts and coaches:
All the objects we have seen were destined to babies in arm without any distinction between males and females. But with the passing of years the small children interest in harness bell, whistles and such toys, vanished. Now they wanted more interesting passtimes and, just as a modern times child dream of himself driving a beautiful red sport car, ancient times boys thought only of horses. Their sisters spent all their days playing with dolls and miniature kitchens, but their brothers passed the time imagining themselves riding a noble animal, a mount even more beautiful than the ones that they their older brothers, fathers and uncles used everyday.
Well to cut a long story short, for the boy there were carts and coaches and, of course, horses which he would proudly rode and, as long as he could made recourse to his fantasy, the greatest gift which God gave to men, a well mounted broom stick became to him a snorting Bucephalus and this mount lifted him into the air and made the child fly more high than Pegasus(fig.3). Many were the toys of these kind which made our ancestors’ infancy a happy one, and we see them painted on the ceramic where merry children ride long sticks. Some of them have not even a broomstick but they ride a tree’s branch while others used long canes as the one described by Horace. Of course to us it doesn’t seem easy to see in a broomstick a fiery horse, but to those children’s eyes they were real ones. And not to speak of those broomsticks which had been completed by an horse head set at its extremity, a thing which helped the children fantasy and made easier for him to imagine that he was riding a beautiful horse.
Sticks of all kinds were good resources for parents and with them they could make happy the child. They could even create an entire stable for him, and they could also furnish him with a luxurious coach. Thus in Greece for the Antesteriae during which festivity the children received many gifts, one of them could be a schematic little cart consisting in a handle to which two wheels had been fixed. We see them in some reppresentation on V cent B. C tombs or white vases. Some time there was only a wheel-barrow (fig.4) some other time a chair was set among the wheels (fig.4) and on this the little and proud owner could sit and make a servant of some kind relative drag him around the house. If then the improvised mount had a very good nature the child, besides urging him with his voice, could even give him some abrupt lashes.
It was a sure things that playing with dream horse or luxurious coach were more amusing of ceramic miniature horses, but the child could always run dragging them around the house with the accompanying usual chorus of urging shouts, and neighing. This was what the happy owner of the ceramic horse that we find in the Roman Germanic Köln Museum did: a little ceramic horse with an hole in its muzzle where one could tie a string to drag the animal around. This was one of a multitude of little horses set on four wheels which belongs to the most disparate epochs and civilizations.
The most ancient models came from the Middle East. Here we find a little cart of an ancient Mesopotamic child, a toy made one thousand of years before the Köln little horse, but which looks identic to the Renan one, and very similar were also all the other little toy horses kept in all the Museums of the world as the ones you find in Corinth, Syracuse, New York and Cheronea. Some time we find also horses with carts with fixed wheels, but those must have belonged to funerary store while some ones sculpted in stone must have been made as offerings to the gods.

Bibliography

Scientific popularization
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, Giocare nel mondo antico in Archeo (Anno IX, nº 6 (112)) June 1994, pp. 40-85

Scientific book
E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, Giochi e giocattoli, Casa Editrice Quasar, Roma 1995