Archeologists in Russia unearthed documents back in the 1950’s that were written on birch bark with a stylus. Some of the documents were doodles by a 7 year old boy named Onfim from Novgorod. Onfim was learning to write, but he doodled in the process. Below you can see some of his drawings.
In the first one he started writing out letters of the alphabet but then created a picture of himself on horseback as a warrior (he put his name next to the warrior).
Below is a doodle of Onfim’s parents…
Here are more people that Onfim drew…
You can see more of Onfim’s drawings here.
It’s interesting how similar these drawings are to a modern day kid’s sketches.
-Mama Lisa
This article was posted on Wednesday, January 15th, 2014 at 4:05 pm and is filed under Arts and Crafts, Countries & Cultures, Drawing, Kids Drawings, Russia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
2 Responses to “A Medieval Child’s Drawings”
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September 22nd, 2015 at 9:02 pm
Thank you very much for this publication. I know about the fact that Russian commoners of the Middle Ages were educated. But I had not seen these pictures. I`ll show them to my colleagues (I’m a teacher in a kindergarten).
I’m only studying English, sorry for mistakes.
September 24th, 2015 at 11:59 am
Thanks for writing Maya! If you’d like to share any of your students drawings, I can post them and link to this post to show old and new drawings from Russian kids!