The Ancient Greeks Invented the Fashion Doll Over 2,500 Years Before Barbie

In my characteristic fashion, I am behind on contemporary popular culture. The movie Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig, came out in July of this year while I was in Greece. It attracted much discussion online and became both the highest-grossing film of this year and the highest-grossing comedy film of all time, but I only just recently watched it for the first time on HBO Max, over five months after it came out. Overall, I found it entertaining and surprisingly thoughtful for a comedy based on a brand of children’s toy.

The film begins with a parody documentary sequence in which the disembodied narrator (played by Helen Mirren) hyperbolically claims that, before Barbie, the only dolls that ever existed were baby dolls. I expect that most viewers will easily recognize this claim as satire, but, in case anyone takes it seriously, I thought I should point out that dolls of adult women with fully articulable joints who could be dressed in various outfits were actually all the rage among children in ancient Greece two thousand five hundred years ago. We know this because literally hundreds of dolls of this kind have survived to the present day and, today, they are held in museum collections all over the world.

The opening scene of Barbie

For those who have not seen it, the film Barbie begins with a parody of the famous opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey that also parodies the kind of overdramatic, self-congratulatory documentary that Mattel (the toy company that sells Barbie products) might produce that would inflate Barbie’s importance in world history. While the screen shows a self-consciously anachronistic scene of little girls in twentieth-century clothing playing with baby dolls in a primitive landscape, Helen Mirren’s voice narrates:

“Since the beginning of time, since the first little girl ever existed, there have been dolls. But the dolls were always and forever baby dolls. The girls who played with them could only ever play at being mothers, which can be fun—at least for a while, anyway. (Ask your mother.) This continued until. . .”

The film then shows the appearance of Margot Robbie as a giant Barbie dressed in a 1950s-style bathing suit, towering over all the girls to the sound of the famous opening fanfare of Richard Strauss’s 1896 tone poem “Also spracht Zarathustra.”

If audiences had any doubt about the spuriousness of the narrative this opening sequence tells, the rest of the film makes it abundantly clear that at least the central claim at the end of this sequence—that Barbie has solved all women’s problems—is completely false. The rest of the sequence is similarly historically incorrect and the surviving ancient Greek dolls are proof of this.

ABOVE: Screenshot of the giant Barbie towering over the little girls from the opening sequence of the 2023 film Barbie

Literary evidence for ancient Greek girls playing with dolls

The most common words for “doll” in Ancient Greek are κόρη (kórē), which literally means “girl” or “maiden,” δαγύς (dagýs), and πλαγγών (plangṓn). Unusually, one of the main pieces of literary evidence for girls playing with dolls is actually a first-hand account written by a woman who describes how she herself played with dolls as a little girl.

Erinna was an ancient Greek poet who most likely flourished sometime in the fourth century BCE. Her best-known work is her poem The Distaff, a lament for her close childhood friend Baukis, who died shortly after her marriage. Although much of this poem has been lost, a large portion of it has survived. At one point in it, Erinna fondly remembers how, when she and Baukis were little, they played together with dolls in their bedrooms. She says (in lines 21–22):

“δαγύ[δ]ων τ᾿ ἐχ[όμεσθα νεαν]ίδες ἐν θαλάμοισι
νύμ[φαι]σιν [προσόμοιοι ἀκηδ]έες·”

This means:

“When we were little girls, we clung to dolls in our bedrooms,
acting like brides, without worries.”

This description is one of the clearest pieces of written evidence that the dolls we find in the archaeological record are toys that children actually played with, rather than merely decorative or ritual objects.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of PSI 1090, a papyrus fragment bearing a portion of the text of Erinna’s Distaff

Marriage, death, and dolls

Erinna’s poem indicates that little girls played with dolls, but other evidence reveals what happened to those dolls when the girls who owned them grew up.

As I discuss in this blog post I made in February 2023, ancient Greek parents typically forced their daughters to marry when they were between the ages of fifteen and nineteen years old. The groom at an ancient Greek wedding was usually at least a decade older than the bride he was marrying and sometimes much older than that. The philosopher Aristotle of Stageira (lived 384 – 322 BCE) writes in his Politics 7.1335a that the ideal age for a girl to marry is when she is eighteen and the ideal age for a man is when he is thirty-seven.

All marriages were arranged between the bride’s father and the prospective groom. How much say a girl had in which man she married probably varied greatly depending on region, time period, and her father’s particular inclinations.

The ancient Greeks regarded a girl’s marriage as her coming-of-age ceremony. Until marriage, a girl was considered a παρθένος (parthénos) or “virgin,” but, when a man married her and sexually penetrated her for the first time, then she became a γυνή (gynḗ), meaning “woman” or “wife.” For a girl, marriage also entailed a fundamental change in her living situation. Upon marrying, a girl would move out of her parents’ house for the first time and go to live in her husband’s house.

ABOVE: Detail of an Attic red-figure vase painting dating to the fifth century BCE depicting a woman preparing a young bride (who is labeled with her name Thalea) for her wedding

If a girl died before she was able to marry, then her family would usually bury her with her childhood toys, including dolls, which, as toys in the shape of adult women, symbolized both the child that she would forever remain and the adult woman that she might have become if she had lived.

Archaeological excavations of tombs of ancient Greek girls who died before marriage have found many examples of toys that these girls played with while they were alive. Unfortunately, toys that were made of highly perishable materials like cloth or wood rarely survive from the ancient world, except in Egypt where the dry climate sometimes enables their preservation, but many ancient toys made of longer-lasting materials like clay, bone, ivory, and glass have survived.

If, on the other hand, a girl lived to see her wedding, then it was customary for her to dedicate some of her childhood toys to the goddess Artemis shortly before the wedding ceremony. An anonymous epigram preserved in the Greek Anthology 6.280 describes a girl named Timareta as dedicating her toys, including her dolls, to Artemis:

“Τιμαρέτα πρὸ γάμοιο τὰ τύμπανα, τήν τ᾿ ἐρατεινὴν
σφαῖραν, τόν τε κόμας ῥύτορα κεκρύφαλον,
τάς τε κόρας, Λιμνᾶτι, κόρᾳ κόρα, ὡς ἐπιεικές,
ἄνθετο, καὶ τὰ κορᾶν ἐνδύματ᾿, Ἀρτέμιδι.
Λατῴα, τὺ δὲ παιδὸς ὑπὲρ χέρα Τιμαρετείας
θηκαμένα, σώζοις τὰν ὁσίαν ὁσίως.”

This means (in my own translation):

“Timareta, before her marriage, dedicates to you, Lady of the Lake,
her hand drums, her lovely ball, the hairnet that held her hair,
and her dolls—a kórē for a kórē, as is fitting—
and her doll’s garments, Artemis.
Daughter of Leto, keep your hand over the child Timareteia;
save her purity purely.”

Once dedicated, these toys would typically remain in the goddess’s sanctuary. Consequently, archaeological excavations at ancient sanctuaries to Artemis, such as the one at Brauron near Athens, have uncovered large numbers of ancient girls’ toys, including dolls.

ABOVE: Photo I took of the archaeological site of Brauron when I visited there this summer, showing part of the ruins of the Temple of Artemis itself (foreground) and the stoa that served as an adjunct building to the temple (background)

Surviving ancient Greek dolls

From surviving examples found in graves and sanctuaries, we know that, starting around the early fifth century BCE, craftsmen in the Greek city-state of Corinth began to mass-produce thousands of dolls of adult women made of materials such as clay, bone, and wood with articulated arms and legs. At least in some cases, it is likely that these dolls originally bore strings that a child could use to move her arms and legs like a puppet.

In some cases, the makers of these dolls painted dresses and jewelry directly on the dolls themselves, but, in other cases, the dolls’ owners most likely dressed them in fashionable outfits that have not survived because they were made of cloth, which decomposes more easily than clay and therefore rarely survives to the present day.

ABOVE: Photo from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website of a Greek terracotta doll with articulated joints, in this case with clothes painted on, made in Corinth sometime in the fifth century BCE

ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons showing a relatively simple Greek terracotta doll with articulable arms and legs, dating to the fifth century BCE, now held in the Getty Villa

Around the middle of the fifth century BCE, Athenian craftsmen began to mass-manufacture more sophisticated dolls with articulated knees instead of or in addition to articulated waists. The higher-end dolls of this kind feature highly realistic-looking facial features and body proportions, were painted in lifelike colors, and sometimes featured gilding.

These higher-end fashion dolls seem to have been popular with girls from wealthy and aristocratic Greek families and are the closest ancient Greek equivalent to modern Barbie dolls. Aesthetically, however, they differ from the “Stereotypical Barbie” type in a number of crucial respects. Notably, while modern Barbie dolls usually have synthetic straight hair attached to their heads, the hair on ancient Greek dolls is invariably molded or carved into the material of the doll itself, is invariably curly in texture, and is often partly covered by a kind of women’s hat known as a sakkos.

This partly reflects a difference between ancient Greek and contemporary U.S. beauty standards. In the contemporary U.S., straight hair is more commonly considered the ideal of beauty, but the ancient Greeks regarded wavy or curly hair, not straight hair, as ideally beautiful. This is why not only their dolls, but also nearly everyone in Greek art has wavy or curly hair. Ancient Greek culture also placed great importance on female modesty and it was common for Greek women to cover their hair at least partly, hence why many of their dolls wear partial hair coverings.

Additionally, while modern Barbie dolls have feet shaped to fit into high-heeled shoes, ancient Greek dolls invariably have flat feet. This is because high-heeled shoes weren’t really fashionable in ancient Greece; if a woman wanted to look taller, she simply wore platform shoes with thick, even soles (see Xenophon, Oikonomikos 10.2).

These kinds of dolls remained popular and beloved among Greek and later Roman girls throughout the rest of classical antiquity.

ABOVE: Photograph by Egisto Sani (posted to Flickr) showing a Greek clay doll of an adult woman holding a pair of krotala (castanets), made in Athens between c. 350 and c. 325 BCE, now held in the Louvre Museum