Part III

In Part II of our series, we discovered what Chancellor Meketre was hoping no one would ever find: his ticket to a comfortable afterlife.

Although there are artifacts that prove children were playing with miniature toys thousands of years ago, we have to thank the desire of a wealthy man to take his fortune to the grave, or more accurately his clever tomb designer, for hiding the 4000-year-old miniature room models so well. But can Meketre's room boxes be considered the first dollhouse?

Technically, no. A house must have a roof. In a search for the first dollhouse, the trail stops dead after the ancient tombs of Egypt. But why did it stop so abruptly? There is no denying that human beings are fascinated with miniature versions of just about anything, so one would expect something to have survived over time. If Meketre could do it, why couldn't others?

The answer is wealth. Meketre had it, but the vast majority of the population did not. While people were struggling to survive, Meketre could afford to hire others to do his bidding, and preserve his possessions. After the Egyptian Dynastic Periods, the upper classes no longer sealed themselves and their possessions in hidden tombs, yet there is a huge gap in tracing the history of the dollhouse.

Lesser versions of miniatures were undoubtedly made during and after the time of Meketre, but the materials that were used withstood neither the test of time (having long since been either worn down to a stub or recycled back into the Earth) nor the children who played with them.

Unlike a 1950's Barbie doll that would still be recognizable in a landfill (with wild hair, of course) an ancient doll may have been carved from wood, with clothing from linen and hair from a horse's tail. If that doll had a house, also most likely made of wood, it too would have eventually suffered the fate of time, or even the flames of a fire to warm a poor man's chilly room on a frigid winter's night.

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