This little doll’s doll is my version of a very old doll indeed.
She’s about 2,500 years old, which is knocking on by any reckoning. Porcelain is not a bad medium in which to have made this copy, the original, in the Metropolitan museum of art, is made of terracotta.
Mine is 1and 3/16th of an inch or 33mm and jointed in the same places as the original, which was jointed with string rather than wire.
She is wearing a red hat and has painted fired hair, like the original but I have given her real clothes rather than painted clothes.
She is wearing the one shoulder shift of a temple dancer, who was probably the Spice Girl of her day.
Ancient dolls turn up in various places. We know that Ancient Roman girls presented their dolls as a rite of passage at the temple when they had achieved womanhood. This might well have meant quite young girls, barely into double figures, marrying into family alliances, rather than reaching physical maturity.
Dolls turn up in tombs with their owners, which must have given comfort to the family of the deceased girl, sending her off into the unknown with her doll to keep her company.
Ancient Egyptians do appear to have been entombed with more dolls than you’d have room for in the average bedroom but they are not dolls as such. They are the ushabti figures or answerers, there to serve and assist in the afterlife. The Ashmolean, among many other major museums, has great collections of what look like not far off twelfth scale wooden figures. These model servants are to work the granaries, mills, wells and all the other model buildings so indispensable to the pharaoh or entombed official in the afterlife. They are usually solid sculptures because it was believed they would be magically transformed into real servants by various spells, after which they’d be stuck grinding grain, or sweeping the floor, for eternity.
There has been a lot written about the purpose of jointed and playable-with dolls from antiquity. After thirty three years of talking to doll collectors both adult and young there is no doubt in my mind that the doll is and always had been the silent and reliable, friend, companion and playmate that everybody needs.
If your museum or nursery of any age needs a Greek temple dancer I will have five at Miniatura. I know that isn’t many, authentic joints in a 12cm terracotta original have proved to be quite tricky to get in an out of a kiln a quarter of that size.
It is and isn’t amazing that two and half thousand years ago when life was much harder, a potter took the time, trouble and clay to make and fire a doll for a child.
I tip my hat to that long gone potter.
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