Ancient Fingerprints: 4,500-Year-Old Children’s Art Discovered by Archaeologists

Pottery vessel made in Tel Hama (Tel Aviv University)

A new study by archaeologists from Tel Aviv University and the National Museum in Copenhagen has shed light on the lives of children in ancient Syria. By analyzing pottery vessels from Tel Hama, a town on the outskirts of the Ebla Kingdom, the team found that two-thirds of the pottery was produced by children as young as seven or eight.

The findings, published in the journal Childhood in the Past, provide compelling evidence of child labor in the Early Bronze Age. While the children were undoubtedly tasked with fulfilling the kingdom’s needs, the archaeologists also discovered pottery that appeared to be the product of the children’s own creativity. This suggests that even in early urban societies, children were capable of expressing themselves artistically and exploring their own ideas.

The Ebla Kingdom was a significant ancient civilization located in Syria, flourishing during the Early Bronze Age (approximately 3500-2000 BCE). Its capital city, Ebla (modern-day Tell Mardikh), was a bustling center of trade, culture, and political power.

Dr. Akiva Sanders, a Dan David Fellow at Tel Aviv University, led the research. His team’s findings offer a fascinating glimpse into the lives of young people in ancient times.

“Our research allows us a rare glimpse into the lives of children who lived in the area of the Ebla Kingdom, one of the oldest kingdoms in the world,” said Sanders. “We discovered that at its peak, roughly from 2400 to 2000 BCE, the cities associated with the kingdom began to rely on child labor for the industrial production of pottery. The children worked in workshops starting at the age of seven, and were specially trained to create cups as uniformly as possible – which were used in the kingdom in everyday life and at royal banquets.”

As is well known, a person’s fingerprints do not change throughout their life. For this reason, the size of the palm can be roughly deduced from measuring the density of the margins of the fingerprint – and from the size of the palm, the age and sex of the person can estimated. The pottery from Tel Hama, on the southern border of the Kingdom of Ebla, was excavated in the 1930s, and since then has been kept in the National Museum in Denmark. From the analysis of the fingerprints of the pottery it appears that most of them were made by children. In the city of Hama city two thirds of the pottery was made by children – the other third was created by older men.

“At the beginning of the Early Bronze Age, some of the world’s first city-kingdoms arose in the Levant and Mesopotamia,” says Dr. Sanders. “We wanted to use the fingerprints on the pottery to understand how processes such as urbanization and the centralization government functions affected the demographics of the ceramic industry. In the town of Hama, an ancient center for the production of ceramics, we initially see potters around the age of 12 and 13, with half the potters being under 18, and with boys and girls in equal proportions. This statistic changes with the formation of the Kingdom of Ebla, when we see that potters were starting to produce more goblets for banquets. And since more and more alcohol-fueled feasts were held, the cups were frequently broken – and therefore more cups needed to be made. Not only did the Kingdom begin to rely more and more on child labor, but the children were trained to make the cups as similar to each other as possible. This is a phenomenon we also see in the industrial revolution in Europe and America: it is very easy to control children and teach them specific movements to create standardization in handicrafts.”

However, there was one bright spot in the children’s lives: making tiny figurines and and miniature vessels for themselves. “These children taught each other to make miniature figurines and vessels, without the involvement of the adults,” says Dr. Sanders. “It is safe to say that they were created by children – and probably including those skilled children from the cup-making workshops. It seems that in these figurines the children expressed their creativity and their imagination.”