Beyond thrice-nine kingdom

New Zealand's Goblin Forest

Honoured to have received some wonderful results from this year’s @greatwalksmag Wilderness Photographer of the Year competition, including a win for ‘Creatures in the Shadows’ (photo 1)

This terracotta figurine was created nearly 2,500 years ago, and it was likely designed as a toy. The doll is positioned above a small tray, and its torso is equipped with a set of pins (located in the waist and shoulders) that allow the figure to lean up and down, gently pushing the rolling pin back and forth across the tray as if preparing food.

Above: another view of the same doll

This is not the only known example of an articulated doll from ancient Greece. Many so-called "dancing dolls" (also known as plangones) were created throughout the Greco-Roman world.

Above: bone figurine with articulated limbs, from ancient Greece, c.350-250 BCE

As this book explains:

Female dolls with attached limbs known as plangones, korai, or nymphai were made in numerous areas in Greece over a considerable span of time from the Geometric to the Hellenistic periods. Male dolls also exist but were far less popular. Although made out of a wide range of materials, including wood, bone, ivory, marble, wax, cloth, and alabaster, dolls of terracotta are by far the most common.

The same book goes on to describe some of the other toys that were created and used by the ancient Greeks:

In antiquity, play was as much an integral part of growing up as it is today, and the ancient Greeks possessed a wide variety of toys and games. Both the archaeological record and ancient literature provide information about these, only some of which overlaps. The most common toys preserved include rattles, dolls, knucklebones, figurines, miniature vessels, miniature furniture, and miniature animals, some of which are wheeled and some of which have riders. Less common are balls and wheeled carts.

Ancient toys have been unearthed in many other parts of the world, too.

Above: a wheeled horse from Roman Egypt, c.50-250 CE

Some of the rattles, pull-toys, articulated dolls, and mechanical figurines from Mesopotamia and Egypt even date back to nearly 4,000 years ago.

Above: a mechanical dog figurine from Egypt, c.1390-1352 BCE, with a lever that opens and closes the dog's mouth

In one of my previous posts, I also mentioned a 3,500-year-old wheeled hedgehog figurine from Iran that may have been created and used as a toy.

Above: wheeled hedgehog from Susa, in modern-day Iran, c.1500-1100 BCE

Sources & More Info:

British Museum: Toy

Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the Classical Past: Jointed Dolls and Play

American Journal of Archaeology: Jointed Dolls in Antiquity

University of Friboug: From Greece to Rome: Toys for Growing Up? (PDF in French)

Metropolitan Museum of Art: Bone Figurine with Articulated Limbs

British Museum: Wheeled Horse

Metropolitan Museum of Art: Mechanical Dog

The Louvre: Hedgehog Toy from Susa

The Louvre: Toy from Ur

Wisptober Day 31 - Silver

"Atop the silver church tower, you can see the outline of a priest standing there, watching."

The Timetables of History by Bernard Grun

I grew up with this book, which is frickin’ enormous, and it was endlessly fascinating to young me to pour over the side by side comparison of events taking place concurrently under different headings and in different parts of the world.

Or if you want something you can put on your wall, there’s this:

Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500

✨️with a special focus on colonialism, militarization, automation, and enclosure✨️

I think it's the galactic orbit thing that really did me in

“You set my world aflame, and I have never desired so desperately to be burned.”

And you know, I thought it was a fair question, so I said that if you eat enough troll meat, you start getting troll-y. And then I went further and just treated it like troll flesh is a general contaminant - if you eat enough troll, you'll turn into a troll, but if you bury enough dead troll flesh in a forest, the trees will start growing in strange ways, and will scream and heal and bleed when you hit them with axes.

I liked this idea. So as we played further, I just played around with the idea of Troll Origins, and I came up with something sort of like the Odyssey, but instead stealing Helios's cattle, it was Hathor's, and the horrible, awful, unending immortality was her curse of the army that pillaged her lands. A god of healing does not condemn you to die, she condemns you to live.

And then I got this fun idea for maybe the king that led the army is still kind of alive in the troll taint. Like a sort of literal fisher king. The kingdom is sick because he is, literally, the kingdom. The trees that bleed, bleed his blood and their screams are his screams. He is both the faintly green bear running down the mountain and the faintly green deer and there is no way past this without suffering. He is the entire ecosystem, and he eats nothing but himself and he dreams nothing but death and yet still, on and on and on and on, he lives.

Anyway they're traveling next session so I'm throwing this shit at them. I already have some gross ideas for like. Describing everything like it's a body (flowers red as blood, white as bone, pink as meat, grass fine as hair) then finally throwing horrible living things at them. Trees that grow eyeballs that turn and stare at them, or flowers with teeth instead of petals and trolls that speak in long dead tongues about how they wish they'd never tried to rob a god.

Melian.

When you feel your heart's guarded and you see the break's started when the clouds have all departed you'll be right here with me.