The hilarious doodles of a medieval schoolboy
Stop what you're doing. I need you to see these.
“It is easy to judge that Onfim’s body of work is no Gilgamesh,” - LitHub.com
Onfim was a boy, about 7 years old, who lived in Novgorod in the 13th century.
Astonishingly, archaeologists discovered his homework and drawings from school, still preserved on birch bark.
And, well, they’re exactly what you’d expect.
To say these doodles are similar to something a kid would do in class now is an understatement. Onfim’s doodles are identical to doodles my classmates would have drawn (not me, I drew car logos).
Also, Onfim would probably wonder why modern boys are still drawing stabby stick figures riding horse blobs despite many centuries of modernization.
Onfim’s poor teacher(?) was apparently not respected, despite clearly teaching him the alphabet:
The Wikipedia article contains nuggets like this: “The number of fingers on the pictured people's hands varies from three to eight; Onfim had yet to learn how to count.”
What we don’t know is whether Onfim’s parents stuck these doodles on their fridge.
In the doodle below, Onfim writes “I am a wild beast” on his creature drawing:
Apparently Onfim had a friend, his sidekick buddy, Danilo, who appears in at least one of the doodles. Onfim wrore “Greeting from Onfim to Danilo” in the wild beast one, perhaps he passed the doodle to him like a note.
Thanks for reading. Remember, history moves along, but humans remain the same, century after century.
Here’s one last doodle from Onfim:
- Joe