Children in Antiquity Perspectives and Experiences of Childhood in the Ancient Mediterranean

Introduction: investigating the ancient Mediterranean ‘childscape’

PART I: What is a child?

1. The ancient Egyptian conception of children and childhood

2. What is a child in Aegean prehistory?

3. Ideological constructions of childhood in Bronze and Early Iron Age Italy: personhood between marginality and social inclusion

4. Defi ning childhood and youth: a regional approach to Archaic and Classical Greece: the case of Athens and Sparta

5. The child in Etruscan Italy

Marjatta Nielsen

6. Children and the Hellenistic period

7. Roman childhood revisited

8. From birth to rebirth: perceptions of childhood in Greco-Roman Egypt

9. Looking for children in Late Antiquity

10. From village to monastery: fi nding children in the Coptic record from Egypt

PART II: Daily life

11. The child’s experience of daily life in ancient Egypt

12. Changing states: daily life of children in Mycenaean and Early Iron Age Greece

Susan Langdon

13. Children in early Rome and Latium

14. Being a child in Archaic and Classical Greece

15. The daily life of Etruscan babies and children

16. Being a child in the Hellenistic world: a subject out of proportion?

17. Diff erent lives: children’s daily experiences in the Roman world

Fanny Dolansky

18. Children as instruments of policy in Hadrian’s Egypt

19. Daily life of children in Late Antiquity: play, work and vulnerability

PART III: Religion and ritual

20. “Child in the nest”: children in Pharaonic Egyptian religion and rituals

21. Children and Aegean Bronze Age religion

22. Initiating children into Italian Bronze and Early Iron Age ritual, religion and cosmology

23. Children in Archaic and Classical Greek religion: active and passive ritual agency

24. Children in Etruscan religion and ritual

25. Children’s roles in Hellenistic religion

26. Children in Roman religion and ritual

27. Children, religion and ritual in Greco-Roman Egypt

28. The child in Late Antique religion and ritual

Béatrice Caseau

PART IV: Death

29. Child, infant and foetal burials in the Egyptian archaeological record: exploring cultural capacities from the Predynastic to Middle Kingdom Periods (c. 4400–1650 BC)

30. “Do not say ‘I am young to be taken’ ”: children and death in ancient Egypt: Second Intermediate Period to the Late Period

31. Children and death in Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Greece

32. Children, death and society in Late Bronze Age and Iron Age Sicily

33. Children and death in Archaic and Classical Greece

34. Infancy and childhood in funerary contexts of Early Iron Age Middle Tyrrhenian Italy: a comparative approach

35. Child death in the Hellenistic world

36. Death of a Roman child

37. Death of a child: demographic and preparation trends of juvenile burials in the Graeco-Roman Fayoum

38. Infant mortality, Michael Psellos and the Byzantine demon Gillo

Lynda Garland

PART V: Bioarchaeology

39. The bioarchaeology of children in Greco-Roman antiquity

40. Infancy and childhood in Roman Egypt: bioarchaeological perspectives

41. “The greatest of treasures”: advances in the bioarchaeology of Byzantine children

Biography

Lesley A. Beaumont is Associate Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Sydney. Her many publications on children in classical antiquity include Childhood in Ancient Athens: Iconography and Social History (Routledge 2012). She co-organised the 2015 international conference on "Children in Antiquity" at the University of Sydney and co-curated the accompanying Nicholson Museum exhibition.

Matthew Dillon is Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of New England, Armidale, Australia. He has written extensively on Greek religion and society.

Nicola Harrington is an Egyptologist and Honorary Research Associate of the University of Sydney. She received her DPhil from the University of Oxford, and her doctoral thesis formed the basis of the monograph Living with the Dead: Ancestor Worship and Mortuary Cult in Ancient Egypt (2012). Her research interests include religion, childhood, and mental illness in antiquity.

“I applaud the editors of this volume! They have successfully put a spotlight on the importance of studying the roles children played in the ancient world. Through this new lens, they show that innovative observations can be made concerning ancient religion, funerary practices, the family, women and gender, and the value systems of ancient societies. In addition to covering a range of Mediterranean time periods and cultures, the editors provide us with essays that investigate a single time period from different angles; the reader will thereby be able to acquire the most holistic understanding of the subject possible. Perhaps most precious of all, these essays show that studying children can offer rather moving glimpses of the lived emotions of ancient individuals.” - Susan Lupack, Macquarie University, Australia

“Childhood in Antiquity is the most broadly based study of ancient Mediterranean children to date, employing the most diverse set of sources to understand them. It is the most chronologically and geographically diverse set of essays about children from the ancient Mediterranean, and is a very useful and broad contribution to the study of ancient children.”- John H. Oakley, The College of William and Mary, USA

“This informative volume, immersive in range and depth, represents a stellar effort to synthesize and advance our knowledge of ancient childhood in the eastern Mediterranean. Its emphasis on variability in the experience, conceptualization and representation of childhood, its cross-cultural perspectives, and its attention to both certainties and gaps in our understanding are salutary. Lucid and engaging, all essays offer glimpses into distinct but interrelated sets of issues and will stimulate scholarly interest and further research.” - Ada Cohen, Dartmouth College, USA

"The editors should be warmly congratulated on bringing together stimulating and innovative contributions, from so many leading and emergent scholars researching childhood in the past... Particular strengths of the volume are its explorations of children’s agency, its focus upon the experiences of children and the attempts of many of its chapters to access children’s perspectives, represented as they typically are through the lens of adult perceptions in archaeological, iconographic, literary and epigraphic records... A successful structure makes the volume easy and efficient to use, and excellent cross-referencing between chapters regularly flags up other relevant material. Ultimately, the volume presents a commendable alternative to works focusing on one theme, methodological approach or region, and it goes some way to addressing lacunae of research on certain periods and areas. It effectively juxtaposes evaluation of areas subjected to minimal previous investigation with those that have well-established sub-disciplines, to highlight where future work needs to be focused to improve our understanding of the many ways childhood could be perceived and experienced in antiquity... The chronological, geographical and typological range that Children in Antiquity covers surely means that it offers something to every scholar with an interest in ancient childhoods and children’s experiences in the past." - The Classical Review