The Antiquity of Toys

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Feb 11, 1915

The Antiquity of Toys

Up to the present, nothing with which man has had to do in the progress and development of the human race has changed as little as toys.

Ages ago infantile Egypt played with dolls, boats, balls, dishes, wagons, miniature horses and other animals. The little Greeks and Romans amused themselves with much the same playthings, except for the further possession of a rattle, which some wise Grecian gentleman very kindly invented for them.

We know this from the chance words of a few early writers; from the sculptures which have been saved of the different ancient nations, which represent children in the act of playing; and also from the fact that many small toys, closely analogous to many toys of today, have been found in the tombs of the children of bygone ages,—dolls, balls, boats, tops, and tiny dishes, added to which there were small warlike implements for the boys, such as javelins and bows and arrows.

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, there is a fascinating terra cotta boat, complete to the smallest detail, says The Mother's Magazine. It was found in the tomb of an Egyptian boy of four thousand years ago.

Take the doll, one of the few of the very old toys which fit into the modern scheme of playthings that teach,—as girls always have and always will play with dolls,—because they develop and foster the birthright of every woman, mother love. The early Egyptians made dolls of earthenware, metal, or stone. Sometimes arms and legs were made solid with the body, sometimes separate and attached by a string. The prehistoric Peruvians had pieces of bone wrapped in cloth, a male doll being identified by the blanket over its shoulders, the female by a petticoat.

Horace makes mention of the stick horses of the Roman children. Chroniclers of the Middle Ages picture little people still astride such makeshift steeds, and the ordinary riding horse of the ordinary child remained a stick with a horse head until late in the seventeenth century. One hundred years later we find horse forms with curtains around them, so that the child might run on his own legs beneath the sheltering drapery, just as clowns in the circus do today. Early in the nineteenth century rocking-horses came into fashion, after which, in 1847, horses were shown at the French exposition, covered with hair and very natural in form—the toy horse, as we know it today.—Selected.