Saturday, December 01, 2012

Mouse

Were someone to ask me to curate a collection of [pick a number] significant human-made objects, one of the first to come on board would be a pull-toy mouse from the British Museum's Egyptian collection. I'm not sure of the date, but the number "4000" is in there somewhere: either 4000 BCE or four thousand years old; I tend to the former. It's small, not much bigger than lifesize, and fairly crude, as you might expect of something made with technologies that were around then: clay body tapering to a point, little wheels for the feet, and a string to pull it by. It's a very simple object, dusty and dull even by the elevated standards of the British Museum, and I am certain that many visitors never notice it. I find it evocative and deeply moving, and it would have pride of place in my collection.

(Reminded of this by reading Celia Pearce's "Communities of Play")

1 Comments:

Anonymous Andy said...

Makes me want to go and look now :-)

December 11, 2012 at 2:26:00 p.m. GMT+1  

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