Hellenic Muses a la Poupee

Greek dolls have been influenced by many cultures, mixing with, and creating doll simultaneously with, Greek artists.

A doll shaped Ouzo bottle; author's collection and public domain

Greek doll wearing clothing of ancient theater.  Author.

Queen Amalia of Greece; outfit she designed c. 1821 from her German Homeland
and contemporary dress.  Sequins represent coins for dowry.  1960s; author.  Brought
from Greece.  Mask face, plastic, and wire, painted features, mohair wig.  Photo Dino Milani.

From Egypt come rag dolls of coarse linen or other cloth, stuffed with papyrus.  Mary Hillier and others have theorized that there were more soft dolls played with in the ancient world, as there were probably wooden dolls and dolls of other materials.  Yet, they only seem to have survive in Egypt because the dry conditions allowed for their preservation.

Mary Hillier in "Dolls and Doll Makers" showed seated dolls with realistic faces and hair styles that resembled those on classic marble statues.  These were missing arms, but obviously had jointed arms at one time.  She called these theater figures, and it is unclear if they are toys or not.  Ancient writer Xenophon allegedly discusses puppets in his works, and Plato's famous "Allegory of the Cave" from "The Republic" alludes to shadow puppets or figures on the wall.

Many other writers feature ancient Greek dolls, and Sappho, classic poet of the Ancient World left a poetic fragment dedicating her doll to Artemis, "despise not my doll's little purple cloak."

Reproduction Kore figures in my collection, one made in Greece, depict young girls before marriage, and are often 2 or 3 feet high, and represent tomb figures.

Gorgeous ivory dolls wearing remnants of gold jewelry, and often found in little girls' tombs with scraps of cloth, were luxury figures, but many terracotta jointed dolls exist in the Benaki Museum and other European museums as proof that children's games of all types existed.  When I was 9, I saw some of these myself at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, and I actually cried from the emotional impact.

Argyriadis writes of dolls created during Byzantium, 330-1453 A.D.  Bone dolls with etched figures, and large luminous eyes were popular.  She quotes St. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople and author of one of The Divine Liturgies of The Greek Orthodox Church, on the similarity between Christian dolls contemporary to him and ancient dolls. Doll makers still worked in clay, cloth, bone, ivory, and wood, just as they had 1000 years before.  Dolls were still sold from workshops.

At the Monastiraki, I bought a black silk Greek doll head, and other souvenir dolls.  We also saw antique German doll heads for sale. Argyriadis pictures many papier mache, wax, and bisque dolls, as well as Dresden German Christmas ornaments , wax angels, and other European toys popular in Greece during the late 19th and 20th centuries. She writes of these so-called "Type V" dolls as heads that come to a point, and date from the first to twelfth centuries.  They were inserted into cloth stuffed bodies, and some had wigs. They remind me of half dolls of the early 20th century.

According to Argyriadis, from the 6th century on, writings talk about little girls' dolls and their importance.  Pollucis Onomasticon mentions dolls in his work, (Lib.IX. 127). During this time dolls were found in children's tombs, and Argyridadis writes these are almost certainly toys.  Pagan worshippers still had their idols at this time, and dolls were even found in the graves of Christian adults as symbols of adults entering the kingdom of Heaven as little children (Matthew XVIII, 3-4). Apparently, she writes there was a common Byzantine phrase cited by Phaidon Koukoules, "We're not playing with dolls." An interesting note is that the Empress Theodora treated her Holy Icons as dolls.  I find this interesting; icons are meant to take the place of religious statues in the early church, yet at the same time, other citizens would have had idols and ritual figures as part of their worship.  People do revere and address their icons as three dimensional figures, and portraits and images like them are indeed cousins to the two dimensional and three dimensional images we call dolls.