Tutankhamun's Trumpet: Ancient Egypt in 100 Objects from the Boy-King's Tomb by Toby Wilkinson

Author:Toby Wilkinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2022-09-24T00:00:00+00:00

If a baby in ancient Egypt survived its first few weeks of life, it was doing well. And if a boy or girl made it through childhood without succumbing to accident or disease, they could count themselves fortunate. Children of all ages were so vulnerable that they were surrounded by magic and religion from birth. Very often, the name given to a child sought to afford it divine protection. Amuletic charms would be placed around babies’ necks to ward off malign forces. Sometimes they took the form of cylindrical tubes containing rolled-up scraps of papyrus; parents would ask their local oracle for a decree granting the child a long and healthy life, which would be recorded on papyrus and worn as a good luck charm.

Once a child was no longer a toddler, they became a useful extra pair of hands for many families. In a society where the overwhelming majority of the population were subsistence farmers or craftspeople, families relied on their children to carry out simple tasks in the fields, in the workshop and around the house. Scenes in private Pyramid Age tombs show young boys watching over flocks of sheep or tending cattle, as Egyptian children in rural villages do today. Boys could also help out by chasing birds away during the grain harvest, collecting firewood for fuel, carrying drinking vessels for herdsmen or passing on messages for their brothers and parents. In a provincial sixth-dynasty tomb, a kitchen scene shows a cook stirring the pot while his assistant eats. The latter asks a young boy to run an errand, and the boy answers, ‘I’ll do it!’

While boys were out in the fields, girls would generally stay at home and help their mothers and older sisters with household chores. In one of the Tombs of the Nobles at Thebes, boys and girls are shown gleaning, picking up missed ears of grain once the reapers have passed, and putting them in baskets. In two other tombs of the same period, girls – probably the daughters of household servants – are shown making up beds for the master and mistress of the house. Boys and girls alike would have been expected to pull their weight from a young age.

However much work children in ancient Egypt were tasked with, there was plenty of time for play. There were places to explore, friends to meet and opportunities to get into scrapes. An eighteenth-dynasty painting shows a boy and a girl being admonished by a doorkeeper whom they have been teasing, while their exhausted nanny drinks from a jar of beer. To keep children out of mischief, they were given simple toys to play with. The earliest examples have been found in predynastic graves. A child’s burial at Nagada, north of Thebes, contained a set of stone skittles, four stone balls and a ‘gate’ of stone bars through which the balls had to be rolled. The set, which employed a variety of costly materials – travertine, breccia, porphyry and marble – must have belonged to the child of a wealthy family.

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