From the Discovery Channel: Artifacts Reveal Childhood in Ancient Greece.
Posted on September 11, 2003 09:51 AM. Filed under: history & archaeology.The first major international exhibit on childhood in ancient Greece reveals startling similarities between the lives of kids from the classical past and 21st century children, including the fact that toys and gadgets comparable to those of the ancient world are still in use today.
Now at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, the exhibit displays potty chairs, pull toys, games, feeders, rattles and other items that almost look as though they came from a modern nursery room. The collection suggests the needs of children, and the stages of early human development, have not changed as much as previously thought over the years. (...)
Jenifer Neils, professor of art history and classics at Case Western Reserve University and co-author of the exhibit's catalogue, Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the Classical Past, said Greek civilization was the first to recognize stages in childhood development, and the first to see youths as not merely miniature adults.
"In their artwork, the Greeks depicted children as they were in real life," Neils told Discovery News. "They represented them in a perceptual, rather than conceptual, manner not seen much in ancient Egypt, or even later in Medieval Europe."
Artifacts show children studying, playing, and possibly even pooping, as one small clay vessel is of a child waving a rattle and sitting on what appears to be a ceramic potty chair. [continue]