Terracotta animal figurines, found at Dilkaya Höyük on the eastern shore of Lake Van and dated to the Early Bronze Age—the third millennium BC.
Look how various they are. One has horns; the next has a face like a puppy; the third is less an animal than a lump of clay in a mood.
What they might have been
Toys, perhaps. Or amulets. Or a way of getting hold of the world by modelling a bull or a goat out of whatever came to hand.
Or—and this is the possibility that spoils one’s assumptions most agreeably—bookkeeping.
Across the Near East in exactly this period, small clay objects were used as counters. A herdsman’s holdings were tallied in tokens; the tokens were sealed inside clay envelopes; the envelopes were marked on the outside with the shapes of the tokens within; and eventually somebody noticed that the marks alone would do. That, on the best-known account of the matter, is how writing began: not with poetry, but with sheep.
The classic tokens are geometric—cones, spheres, discs—and animal figurines are usually filed under something else. The argument is not settled. But the neighbourhood is close enough that a clay goat in the third millennium BC might quite reasonably be somebody’s livestock inventory.
Children play with anything
Which settles nothing, because a counter and a toy are not rival categories.
Give a child a basket of clay animals used for tallying the herd and you have not given the child an accounting system. You have given the child a bull, a goat and a dog. Children play with whatever is to hand—buttons, coins, keys, and certainly small clay animals—and no archaeologist can look at a worn terracotta bull and say which of the two lives it had. Very probably it had both, on the same afternoon.
The point lies elsewhere
This is not the childhood of humanity. The third millennium BC has cities, kings, metallurgy and, in Mesopotamia, a functioning bureaucracy; these people were nobody’s infants.
What is childlike here is not the age of the makers but the freshness of the looking. Whoever pinched out that puppy-faced muzzle was seeing an animal, not filing one. The lines are approximate because approximation was enough; the thing needed to be recognisable, not correct. And that manner of seeing is not a stage that civilisations pass through and leave behind. It is available at any date, to anyone, and it is what makes these lumps of fired clay worth stopping in front of four and a half thousand years later.
