4,500-year-old fingerprints show ancient potters in Syria were child laborers

Archaeologists from Tel Aviv University and the National Museum in Copenhagen have discovered the fingerprints of children as young as 7 or 8 on 4,500-year-old pottery vessels found at an archaeological site in Syria.

Archaeologists analyzed 450 pottery vessels made in Tel Hama, a city on the outskirts of the Ebla Kingdom, one of the most important Syrian kingdoms in the Early Bronze Age, and found that two-thirds of the pottery vessels were made by children – starting at the age of seven and eight years.

In addition to the use of children to serve the needs of the kingdom, they discovered evidence of children’s independent creations outside of industrial settings, demonstrating the spark of childhood even in early urban societies.

The research adds valuable depth to our understanding of what it once meant to be a child. If properly analyzed, these observations show that future research on archaeological fingerprints has the potential to deepen our understanding of childhood in different places and periods.

The research was led by Akiva Sanders of Tel Aviv University in collaboration with researchers from Copenhagen. The results were published in the journal Childhood in the Past.

“Our research gives us a rare insight into the lives of children who lived in the territory of the Ebla Kingdom, one of the oldest kingdoms in the world,” says Sanders. “We found that the cities associated with the kingdom were at their peak, around 2400 to 2000 BC. BC, began to rely on child labor in the industrial production of pottery. From the age of seven, the children worked in workshops and were specially trained to make cups that were as uniform as possible – which were used in everyday life in the kingdom and at royal banquets.

As is well known, a person’s fingerprints do not change throughout their life. For this reason, by measuring the edge density of the fingerprint, it is possible to roughly determine the size of the palm – and to estimate the age and gender of the person from the size of the palm.

Since its excavation in the 1930s, the pottery from Tel Hama, located on the southern edge of the Kingdom of Ebla, has been housed in the Danish National Museum. Based on the fingerprint analysis of the pottery, it appears that most of them were made by children. In Hama, two-thirds of the pottery was made by children and the remaining third by older men.

“At the beginning of the Early Bronze Age, some of the world’s first city kingdoms emerged in the Levant and Mesopotamia,” says Sanders. “We wanted to use the fingerprints on the ceramics to understand how processes such as urbanization and the centralization of state functions affect the demographics of the ceramics industry. In the city of Hama, an ancient center of ceramic production, we first see potters aged around 12 and 13, with half of the potters under 18 and an equal number of boys and girls.

“This statistic changes with the founding of the Kingdom of Ebla, as we see that potters began making more goblets for banquets. And as more and more alcoholic celebrations were held, the cups often broke – and more cups had to be made.

“Not only did the kingdom begin to rely more and more on child labor, but the children were also trained to make the cups as closely as possible. This is a phenomenon that we also see in the industrial revolution in Europe and America: it is very easy to control children and teach them certain movements in order to create standardization in crafts.”

However, there was a bright spot in the children’s lives: making tiny figurines and miniature vessels for themselves. “These children taught each other to make miniature figurines and vessels without adult involvement,” says Dr. Sanders.

“It’s safe to say that they were created by children – and probably by the skilled children in the cup-making workshops. It seems that the children expressed their creativity and imagination in these figures.”

The Independent Research Fund Denmark supported the research carried out for this article as part of the project “Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times: A New View of the Earliest Urban Societies in Bronze Age Syria”.

Doi.org/10.1080/17585716.2024.2380137

Cover photo: Ruins of the southern district, with the Damascus Gate in the background and the defensive belt at Ebla. Mappo