8 ms·

Girls and dolls in the Roman Empire

72 points by diodorus 6y ago

jimmyed 6y ago
This article does the difficult job of actually saying nothing interesting but still giving the impression that it holds some great newly discovered insight about Roman doll playing.
- yetihehe 6y ago
  It just specifically lists how children could play with those dolls, not all articles must have "newly discovered insights". For example, I didn't know they had such precisely made and articulated dolls in those times.
  - myspy 6y ago
    I always wonder what kids could play with in other time periods. I guess that woodwork always was pretty excellent, so there could be all sorts of stuff that is lost by now.
    - eckmLJE 6y ago
      There's an interesting note on this in "The World Until Yesterday" by Jared Diamond about traditional societies (typically he's talking about pre-contact primitive humans). Many children fashioned their own toys after the real tools/equipment/vehicles used by the adults in their lives.
    - petermcneeley 6y ago
      I always found the quite interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South-pointing_chariot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South-pointing_chariot
    - vnorilo 6y ago
      I'm pretty sure kids would do just fine with sticks, mud, pine cones and whatever scrap is lying around. At least mine did before they got engaged in the paychological warfare that is cartoons, toy stores and catalogs. Even now they seem to stay interested in their paper boats/air planes much longer than the latest paw patrol truck.
    - dudeinjapan 6y ago
      For girls in all cultures, playing with some form of doll is a near universal. It's even true of young female chimpanzees. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/101220-chimpanzees-play-nature-nurture-science-animals-evolution https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/101220-chi...
    - bluGill 6y ago
      My aunt growing up in Korea (just after WWII when it wasn't nearly as rich as today) used carrots that had two legs for her dolls. Kids can make anything work.
      - lnwlebjel 6y ago
        My daughter literally put a smiley face on a roll of tissue paper and used it as a stuffed toy, so yeah they can be pretty creative given the chance.
      - zikzak 6y ago
        As a kid, the only real toy I had was Lego (and a bike, etc). I had other odds and ends but we didn't buy toys (my family was financially secure, my parents were just cheap/not into material stuff). Being the youngest grandchild of a large extended family, there was a lot of Lego. If I wanted to play "space", I'd build a rocket ship. I had friends and cousins in a similar situation but because thier families were probably cheque to cheque or worse. They didn't even have Lego. We'd make toys with sticks or stuff we found on garbage day, etc. As I got older, I had school friends with everything (full collection of Star Wars stuff, etc). They were always bored. "There's nothing to do!" :)
  - jariel 6y ago
    "It just specifically lists how children could play with those dolls, " No, it doesn't at all do that. Not even in one instance. The article says 'these dolls have certain characteristics' - and then goes on to speculate bout the potential social ramifications of such playtime without any real evidence. The article fails to hone in on the social nature of playtime at all.
- 21eleven 6y ago
  True but I did appreciate the images of the wooden dolls.
  - SinasinaX 6y ago
    Yeah, same here.
- tadah 6y ago
  Disappointed in you for making such a comment.
- cambalache 6y ago
  Welcome to most of academic publications in the humanities (and recently even in hard-science)
unfocused 6y ago
If anyone wants to dive more into the wooden doll world, The Miyagi kokeshi doll - https://kogeijapan.com/locale/en_US/miyagidentokokeshi/ https://kogeijapan.com/locale/en_US/miyagidentokokeshi/ although not as old as this Roman one is interesting. Here is a 3m30s video on who they make them by hand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8uRxvm6sUs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8uRxvm6sUs
mncharity 6y ago
The article currently confuses two dolls. The top image matches its caption link[1], but not its caption text. The pictured "Grottarossa" doll, was buried by the via Appia near Rome, with a mummified 2nd-century ~12-year old girl. The caption text's "Illustration of the Ancient Roman doll of Crepereia Tryphaena" refers to a similar doll[2] from another 2nd C. sarcophagus in Rome. I used the former in a video fragment on remembering scale - like Powers-of-Ten, but with 1000x chunks. "How do we play with things that are too big to play with? Like cars, and people, and trains? We use scale models. Like dolls, and toy ..., but with more zoom." Buildings view (1 mm:m); real world; micro view (1 mm:um - red blood cells are M&Ms); nano view (1 mm:nm - atoms are sand). I should get back to that someday. [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Roman_ivory_doll_from_the_mid-2nd_century_AD,_from_the_%27Grottarossa_Mummy%27_sarcophagus,_Palazzo_Massimo_alle_Terme,_Rome_(15725663442).jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Roman_ivory_doll_fro... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Crepereia_Tryphaena-2.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Crepereia_Tryphaena-2.png
seneca 6y ago
> These toys carried strong messages about girls’ expected roles in society. It's sad to see this Critical Theory nonsense trickling into real disciplines. Children play pretend, and they dress their dolls like their mothers and other people they admire. It's not an insidious plot, it's a culture and youthful admiration. If you can look at a toy a child loves so much that they were buried with it and see a ploy by society to control them, you've gone off the rails.
- crocsarecool 6y ago
  Yeah, I was surprised they made that leap to the dolls carrying messages about their expected roles in society. As a little girl, my doll was more an outlet to be able to imitate my mother. She’d give me a cuddle, clothe me, put me down for a nap, and I did all that with my doll. I also had a play telephone that I’d pretend to use while watching my parents speak on the telephone. My expected role in society isn’t a telephone operator.
- dbspin 6y ago
  Right? And the message they carry is that adulthood is possible. The entire point of dolls for both boys and girls is to play at being adults, which they do spontaneously cross culturally anyway. These toys facilitate fantasies of empowerment and maturity, and as such are an important part of how we develop into adult humans. They're not top down imposed cultural conditioning.
- frellus 6y ago
  Spot on. I have two girls. Neither were "encouraged" to play with dolls, nor was it any sort of "gender role re-enforcement". Girls like dolls because it's roll play on many levels (relationships, role) as well as a way to nurture something, as is likely built into the female DNA and brain. If you think dolls are some sort of abusive form of biased gender conformity, you're sick in the head and we could never hang out together.
  - RIMR 6y ago
    You're right. I would never want to hang out with someone who, because of a single difference in opinion about dolls, would conclude that I am "sick in the head" and therefore socially worthless. And I'm not even touching your "female DNA" comment, though I'm sure if we dug our heels into that we'd find several more reasons you're no good to be around.
frellus 6y ago
I'm so glad we're not politicizing science . . .
- dang 6y ago
  "Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- RIMR 6y ago
  It's literally filed under the "politics & history" section. Sorry you got triggered that they acknowledged the existence of societal gender roles.
jariel 6y ago
Is every discipline now destroyed by Intersectional nonsense? "Analyzing the dolls of elite girls shows that playthings reinforced gendered expectations but also allowed for imaginative play." "Barbie dolls tend to get a bad rap. Critics rebuke them for promoting harmful body standards and other sexist tropes in the minds of young children." Except for the millions of girls who like playing with them? "But some scholars note that the dolls also allow for versatile, wide-ranging play, because of their lack of prescriptive narratives. Despite their faults, Barbies can become anything—or anyone—the child wants them to be." Some Scholars ? We are now attributing 'Kids Like Toys And Have Imagination' to the narrow testament of scholarship? "These toys carried strong messages about girls’ expected roles in society. Like modern Barbies, they mirrored the body ideals of Roman times, in this case small breasts and wide hips. Because they resembled adult women, they were likely intended to help young girls contemplate their future as wives and mothers." So dolls aren't 'toys'? They are just fascist propaganda? If they are 'long and thin' they reinforce 'Evil Gender Stereotypes'? But if they have wider hips and more 'body natural' they reinforce 'Evil Gender Stereotypes'? The doll makers were regrouped by the 'Domninus Cultural Senate of Men' led by 'Claudius Mansplainus' to make sure they made evil dolls for conformity? Or is it perhaps 'many girls like dressing up and being pretty and Barbie is a doll some girls like' ... and 'ancient girls also liked playing with dolls, representatives of older women who they aspired to be'? And that despite 2000 years of advancing knowledge, we still have not figured out how to see basic truths through a wall of ideological noise? Did they miss the most important point and how 'Ancient Dolls related to Trump's disgusting Tweets'? This was painful to read and the scholarship was lost. What is 'remarkable' about the toy is that it seems to reflect almost perfectly the aspirations of people in similar situations today. The 'dolls' really aren't that far off Barbie, and probably represent in young ladies most of the same social artifacts and aspirations.
- gred 6y ago
  It's how you get noticed these days. It's hard for me to read past it as well, but I assume we'll continue to make slow progress understanding the past, even with these self-imposed handicaps.
- cambalache 6y ago
  It is, what it is worst it has become a sort of neo cultural imperialism , where white monolingual Anglos tell for example to Latinos that their gendered languages are wrong and must be changed.

72 points by diodorus 6y ago

This article does the difficult job of actually saying nothing interesting but still giving the impression that it holds some great newly discovered insight about Roman doll playing.

yetihehe 6y ago
It just specifically lists how children could play with those dolls, not all articles must have "newly discovered insights". For example, I didn't know they had such precisely made and articulated dolls in those times.
- myspy 6y ago
  I always wonder what kids could play with in other time periods. I guess that woodwork always was pretty excellent, so there could be all sorts of stuff that is lost by now.
  - eckmLJE 6y ago
    There's an interesting note on this in "The World Until Yesterday" by Jared Diamond about traditional societies (typically he's talking about pre-contact primitive humans). Many children fashioned their own toys after the real tools/equipment/vehicles used by the adults in their lives.
  - petermcneeley 6y ago
    I always found the quite interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South-pointing_chariot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South-pointing_chariot
  - vnorilo 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure kids would do just fine with sticks, mud, pine cones and whatever scrap is lying around. At least mine did before they got engaged in the paychological warfare that is cartoons, toy stores and catalogs. Even now they seem to stay interested in their paper boats/air planes much longer than the latest paw patrol truck.
  - dudeinjapan 6y ago
    For girls in all cultures, playing with some form of doll is a near universal. It's even true of young female chimpanzees. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/101220-chimpanzees-play-nature-nurture-science-animals-evolution https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/101220-chi...
  - bluGill 6y ago
    My aunt growing up in Korea (just after WWII when it wasn't nearly as rich as today) used carrots that had two legs for her dolls. Kids can make anything work.
    - lnwlebjel 6y ago
      My daughter literally put a smiley face on a roll of tissue paper and used it as a stuffed toy, so yeah they can be pretty creative given the chance.
    - zikzak 6y ago
      As a kid, the only real toy I had was Lego (and a bike, etc). I had other odds and ends but we didn't buy toys (my family was financially secure, my parents were just cheap/not into material stuff). Being the youngest grandchild of a large extended family, there was a lot of Lego. If I wanted to play "space", I'd build a rocket ship. I had friends and cousins in a similar situation but because thier families were probably cheque to cheque or worse. They didn't even have Lego. We'd make toys with sticks or stuff we found on garbage day, etc. As I got older, I had school friends with everything (full collection of Star Wars stuff, etc). They were always bored. "There's nothing to do!" :)
- jariel 6y ago
  "It just specifically lists how children could play with those dolls, " No, it doesn't at all do that. Not even in one instance. The article says 'these dolls have certain characteristics' - and then goes on to speculate bout the potential social ramifications of such playtime without any real evidence. The article fails to hone in on the social nature of playtime at all.
21eleven 6y ago
True but I did appreciate the images of the wooden dolls.
- SinasinaX 6y ago
  Yeah, same here.
tadah 6y ago
Disappointed in you for making such a comment.
cambalache 6y ago
Welcome to most of academic publications in the humanities (and recently even in hard-science)

unfocused 6y ago

If anyone wants to dive more into the wooden doll world, The Miyagi kokeshi doll - https://kogeijapan.com/locale/en_US/miyagidentokokeshi/ https://kogeijapan.com/locale/en_US/miyagidentokokeshi/ although not as old as this Roman one is interesting. Here is a 3m30s video on who they make them by hand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8uRxvm6sUs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8uRxvm6sUs

mncharity 6y ago

The article currently confuses two dolls. The top image matches its caption link[1], but not its caption text. The pictured "Grottarossa" doll, was buried by the via Appia near Rome, with a mummified 2nd-century ~12-year old girl. The caption text's "Illustration of the Ancient Roman doll of Crepereia Tryphaena" refers to a similar doll[2] from another 2nd C. sarcophagus in Rome. I used the former in a video fragment on remembering scale - like Powers-of-Ten, but with 1000x chunks. "How do we play with things that are too big to play with? Like cars, and people, and trains? We use scale models. Like dolls, and toy ..., but with more zoom." Buildings view (1 mm:m); real world; micro view (1 mm:um - red blood cells are M&Ms); nano view (1 mm:nm - atoms are sand). I should get back to that someday. [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Roman_ivory_doll_from_the_mid-2nd_century_AD,_from_the_%27Grottarossa_Mummy%27_sarcophagus,_Palazzo_Massimo_alle_Terme,_Rome_(15725663442).jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Roman_ivory_doll_fro... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Crepereia_Tryphaena-2.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Crepereia_Tryphaena-2.png

seneca 6y ago

> These toys carried strong messages about girls’ expected roles in society. It's sad to see this Critical Theory nonsense trickling into real disciplines. Children play pretend, and they dress their dolls like their mothers and other people they admire. It's not an insidious plot, it's a culture and youthful admiration. If you can look at a toy a child loves so much that they were buried with it and see a ploy by society to control them, you've gone off the rails.

crocsarecool 6y ago
Yeah, I was surprised they made that leap to the dolls carrying messages about their expected roles in society. As a little girl, my doll was more an outlet to be able to imitate my mother. She’d give me a cuddle, clothe me, put me down for a nap, and I did all that with my doll. I also had a play telephone that I’d pretend to use while watching my parents speak on the telephone. My expected role in society isn’t a telephone operator.
dbspin 6y ago
Right? And the message they carry is that adulthood is possible. The entire point of dolls for both boys and girls is to play at being adults, which they do spontaneously cross culturally anyway. These toys facilitate fantasies of empowerment and maturity, and as such are an important part of how we develop into adult humans. They're not top down imposed cultural conditioning.
frellus 6y ago
Spot on. I have two girls. Neither were "encouraged" to play with dolls, nor was it any sort of "gender role re-enforcement". Girls like dolls because it's roll play on many levels (relationships, role) as well as a way to nurture something, as is likely built into the female DNA and brain. If you think dolls are some sort of abusive form of biased gender conformity, you're sick in the head and we could never hang out together.
- RIMR 6y ago
  You're right. I would never want to hang out with someone who, because of a single difference in opinion about dolls, would conclude that I am "sick in the head" and therefore socially worthless. And I'm not even touching your "female DNA" comment, though I'm sure if we dug our heels into that we'd find several more reasons you're no good to be around.

frellus 6y ago

I'm so glad we're not politicizing science . . .

dang 6y ago
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
RIMR 6y ago
It's literally filed under the "politics & history" section. Sorry you got triggered that they acknowledged the existence of societal gender roles.

jariel 6y ago

Is every discipline now destroyed by Intersectional nonsense? "Analyzing the dolls of elite girls shows that playthings reinforced gendered expectations but also allowed for imaginative play." "Barbie dolls tend to get a bad rap. Critics rebuke them for promoting harmful body standards and other sexist tropes in the minds of young children." Except for the millions of girls who like playing with them? "But some scholars note that the dolls also allow for versatile, wide-ranging play, because of their lack of prescriptive narratives. Despite their faults, Barbies can become anything—or anyone—the child wants them to be." Some Scholars ? We are now attributing 'Kids Like Toys And Have Imagination' to the narrow testament of scholarship? "These toys carried strong messages about girls’ expected roles in society. Like modern Barbies, they mirrored the body ideals of Roman times, in this case small breasts and wide hips. Because they resembled adult women, they were likely intended to help young girls contemplate their future as wives and mothers." So dolls aren't 'toys'? They are just fascist propaganda? If they are 'long and thin' they reinforce 'Evil Gender Stereotypes'? But if they have wider hips and more 'body natural' they reinforce 'Evil Gender Stereotypes'? The doll makers were regrouped by the 'Domninus Cultural Senate of Men' led by 'Claudius Mansplainus' to make sure they made evil dolls for conformity? Or is it perhaps 'many girls like dressing up and being pretty and Barbie is a doll some girls like' ... and 'ancient girls also liked playing with dolls, representatives of older women who they aspired to be'? And that despite 2000 years of advancing knowledge, we still have not figured out how to see basic truths through a wall of ideological noise? Did they miss the most important point and how 'Ancient Dolls related to Trump's disgusting Tweets'? This was painful to read and the scholarship was lost. What is 'remarkable' about the toy is that it seems to reflect almost perfectly the aspirations of people in similar situations today. The 'dolls' really aren't that far off Barbie, and probably represent in young ladies most of the same social artifacts and aspirations.

gred 6y ago
It's how you get noticed these days. It's hard for me to read past it as well, but I assume we'll continue to make slow progress understanding the past, even with these self-imposed handicaps.
cambalache 6y ago
It is, what it is worst it has become a sort of neo cultural imperialism , where white monolingual Anglos tell for example to Latinos that their gendered languages are wrong and must be changed.