Ancient child-produced or child-centered text survives almost entirely from one Egyptian town
Evidence
Roughly ten percent of the Oxyrhynchus corpus — and “roughly” is important; the categories shade into each other — involves children directly. Personal letters from children to parents and from parents to children. School exercises in children’s handwriting. Drafts of school assignments with corrections. Practice alphabets, syllable-charts, and grammatical drills. Medical-petition documents about sick children. Legal documents in which children’s interests are at stake. Census-records identifying children in households. The direct corpus of child-produced or child-centered text is substantial. By some estimates, the Oxyrhynchus child-centered corpus is larger than all surviving child-centered text from all other ancient Mediterranean sources combined. — , The Rod and the Child, 1532
Categorization
- XREF: Builds on the thesis that the episodic sources (Sumerian, Egyptian, Hebrew, Augustine) are thin; this passage grounds the book’s entire evidentiary base. — connects to: Surviving records bias our picture of ancient child-rearing toward literate cultures. — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 1212