On pottery discovered at Tel Hama in the Jordan Valley, the fingerprints reveal the work of children in the Bronze Age
Every parent hangs the paintings that their child brings from kindergarten on the refrigerator and thinks to himself that this is the next Van Gogh. But in ancient times there were those who took advantage of this to turn the children into servants of the kingdom: archaeologists from Tel Aviv University and the National Museum in Copenhagen analyzed 450 pottery vessels produced in Tel Hama, a daughter city of the kingdom of Ebla, one of the most important Syrian kingdoms in the Early Bronze Age (about 4500 a year before our time), and found that two-thirds of the pottery was made by children, starting at the ages of seven and eight. Alongside the children's work for the kingdom's needs, evidence was also found of the children's independent creation outside the industrial framework, which may imply the preservation of the spark of childhood even in early urban societies.
The surprising research was conducted under the leadership of Dr. Akiva Sanders, a Dan David Fellow for the study of the past in the Lester and Sally Antin Faculty of Humanities, in collaboration with researchers from the National Museum of Denmark. The results of the study were published in the journal Childhood in the Past.
A particularly young workforce
"Our research allows us to get a rare glimpse into the lives of children who lived in the region of the Kingdom of Abela, one of the oldest kingdoms in the world. We discovered that at its peak, from approximately 2400 to 2000 BC, the cities associated with the Kingdom of Abela began to rely on child labor for the mass and industrial production of pottery. The children worked in the workshops starting at the age of seven, and were specially trained to create trophies as uniform as possible - which were used by the kingdom in everyday life and at the royal banquets," explains Dr. Sanders.
As we know, a person's fingerprints do not change throughout his life. For this reason, the size of the palm can be roughly deduced from measuring the density of the margins of the fingerprint, and the age and sex of the person can be roughly deduced from the size of the palm. The pottery from Tel Hama, on the southern border of the Kingdom of Abala, was excavated in the 30s, and since then they have been kept in the National Museum in Denmark. From the analysis of the fingerprints of the pottery it appears that most of them were made by children. In Hama city, two thirds of the pottery was made by children. The other third was created by older men.
Pottery decorated by children
When the child brings a drawing from kindergarten and makes a career out of it
"At the beginning of the Early Bronze Age, some of the first city-kingdoms arose in the Levant and Mesopotamia," says Dr. Sanders. "We wanted to use the fingerprints on the pottery to understand how processes such as urbanization and central government affected the demographics of the ceramic industry. In the city of Hama, which was an ancient center for the production of ceramics, we initially see potters around the age of 12 and 13, and in any case half of them are under 18, boys and girls in equal proportion. This statistic changes with the formation of a kingdom of mourning. We see that they are starting to produce more goblets for banquets. And since more and more feasts are held, and alcohol is drunk at these feasts, the cups are obviously broken - and therefore more cups need to be made. Not only did the kingdom begin to rely more and more on child labor, but these children were trained to make the cups so that they were as similar to each other as possible. This is a phenomenon we also see in the industrial revolution in Europe and America: it is very easy to control children and teach them specific movements to create standardization in handicrafts."
However, there was one bright spot in the children's lives: making tiny figurines and tools for their complete enjoyment. "These children taught each other to make miniature figurines and tools, without the involvement of the adults," says Dr. Sanders. It is safe to say that they were created by children - and probably by those skilled children from the cup making workshops. It seems that in these figurines the children expressed their creativity, their imagination and their childhood."
More of the topic in Hayadan:
