Thinking about Onfim.
Back in the day (and today as well I suppose,) if you lived near Birch trees you could peel them and use the white bark as paper.
Sometimes these paper scraps survive for hundreds of years, and we find them, like perfect little tablets, as honest snapshots into the lives of people who lived long ago. They look like this:
A whole cache was found near Novgorod Russia from the 13th Century authored by a young boy named Onfim. He is estimated to be around 9.
What has made these discoveries notable is that these are his homework scraps, and he has also doodled on them:
My favorites are these:
Here Onfim was doing schoolwork in the top right, got bored, then drew himself as a might Knight in the heat of battle.
In this inscription Onfim writes: "Lord, please help your servant Onfim," drawing below a terrible battle between a hellish monster and Onfin himself
And Last, but not least, and certainly my favorite:
Here, on the back of a school assignment, Onfim draws an awesome monster with cat ears and a curly tail with the inscription: "I am a wild beast," indicating that this depiction is Onfim as a monster. On the top right is a speech bubble that says: "Hello from Onfim to Danillo," whom researchers believe was his schoolmate.
Stuff like this really highlights that everyone experiences commonalities that links us together, inseparable, even through the annals of time.
I mean, I definitely doodled on my homework.
