Children’s Material Culture

This chapter explores the material culture of children in the Petrie collection, and what these items can reveal about children’s experience, agency, and concerns in the Roman and late Roman periods of Egypt. It considers informal spheres of everyday life for children: the family, peer relationships, play, and religion, asking how children themselves would have had some agency in shaping their perspectives of the world around them. The chapter considers the designed and functional properties of wooden and ceramic dolls, within a framework of dolls in earlier periods of Egyptian history and across the Roman world more broadly. It asks of these, and other objects of children’s cultures, how they held the capacity to be played and interacted with in a range of ways, individually or with peers, that were more nuanced than their designed use in socializing children in different social groups. The chapter examines ceramic boats, wooden pull-along horses, and animal figurines. The chapter also studies the commonplace figure of Harpokrates, the child-protector deity, as represented on small objects, and his familiarity with children.