THE WORLD IS SO FRAGILE

EYE SECTOR

March 16 in the Samara House-Museum of V.I. Lenin opened a traveling interregional exhibition "The Archeology of Childhood: Toys, Games and Rituals in Traditional Societies". There are toys that our ancestors and ancestors played when ...

March 16 in the Samara House-Museum of V.I. Lenin opened a traveling interregional exhibition "The Archeology of Childhood: Toys, Games and Rituals in Traditional Societies". There are toys that our ancestors and ancestors played when they were still ancestors. As an expert, I took my one and a half year old daughter to this exhibition.

Ancestral toy expert appreciated. In any case, he showed a clear desire to get to know the objects closer, to try them by mouth, taste, smell ... A creature that has recently parted with eternity and started a human path, our respect for shaggy millennia is incomprehensible, so the expert urgently had to be loaded into a backpack- kenguryatnik. And at the next window we stared at our reflection: a native woman and her baby were looking at us, attached to her mother with a simple sling. Here we understand everything.

Toys have not changed for many millennia. The color, the material from which they are made, the shape, often due to the same material, have changed. In the fourth millennium BC, a child played with a clay rattle, shaped like a small jug, in which several pebbles were soldered. Ancient Egyptian girls played with dolls, they even had doll clay sets. The boys rolled clay wagons, shot from small bows. My modern-day daughter greeted a teddy bear sitting in another shop window as if it were her own, but meanwhile his ancestor, sewn from sheepskin and stuffed with bird feathers, was found in the pyramid of Cheops.

Comfortable items that were previously considered a relic are now making a comeback labeled "tradition". You can now buy a birch bark rattle in an art salon. The cradles that the ancient Slavs and North American Indians wove from birch bark are returning. True, we no longer put a knife or an ax there as a talisman. But the grandmother, no, no, and even put some icon with an image printed on a printer under the mattress. Modern pots amaze the imagination - it's just an achievement of technical genius that plays a victory march as soon as a child deigns to sit on it. And our little ancestors had to be content with tuvaks - clay glass-shaped vessels. And instead of diapers, children used to have suvaki - urinal tubes that were made from hollow bones and even glass.

People and toys have not changed - our attitudes and beliefs have changed. We still continue to decorate children's clothes with cheerful appliqués. And we don’t think that for many millennia all mothers did this with one goal - to protect the child from evil spirits. An animal figurine, which was sewn onto clothes, served as a talisman. Rattles were also a talisman, and they still are: modern parents often perform with them at the bed of a roaring child a ritual dance called “whatever the child amuses”.

Previously, they said about a naughty child that a demon had possessed him, and they believed: you need to rustle with a shambler or hold the possessed over acrid smoke - and the demon will come out, and the child will again become pure and innocent, because these qualities are inherent in him from the very beginning. And a modern mother yells in the yard, blushing her face and rolling her eyes, at her two-year-old son, who does not want to give someone else's shoulder blade: “What a naughty child, what a stubborn one!”. She threatens to take him home as a punishment, shakes him with a bunch of keys. And suddenly the kid, as if spellbound, rushes to this ringing bunch, someone else's shoulder blade is forgotten - and the spirit of stubbornness evaporated, frightened by the cheerful ringing. Did the mother only notice that her son was not at all stubborn?

... When we were about to leave, two teenagers came to the exhibition. In tracksuits, short hair, with a half-finished bottle of Coca-Cola. We walked along the shop windows and (as we would say in childhood) “looked” at the toys. They were clearly interested.

We were told that the museum has a special room where children are allowed to play with models of ancient toys, shake a real rock, spin a spinning top, and even draw their own rock drawing with a felt-tip pen on a sheet of drawing paper. They say that unusual toys delight the computer generation.

And there is a special room for initiation. Teenagers who passed this rite (and it often represented very serious tests) became full members of society. The room has two doors: a person entered one as a child, and the other went out as an adult. My daughter, whom I finally let out to run, walked confidently to the "adult" exit, walked the room in the opposite direction and went out into childhood.