For reasons that made sense at the time, I’ve been wandering through museum collections online looking at ancient rattles, and then I did versions of a bunch of them in modern clay:
These are modeled after some from Babylonian Ur at least 4,000 years ago.
There are a lot of this double-pie-crust shape. (You can perhaps tell I don’t make that kind of pies by how bad my pinchy edges are here…)
This pig looks like it’s part bird.
Chicken!!
A slightly more pig-like pig.
The original of this was missing the head, but with two humps on the back it was obviously a camel.*
*“obviously”-- after you’ve looked at a lot of animal figures, you start to get the sense that some of the people cataloging them had absolutely no idea what some of these things were supposed to be either.
These are styles from Cyprus, and they’re only ~3500 years old…
Little Owls (probably… there’s at least one place that describes them as cats…) which are basically just at tiny amphora (the basic food transport & storage container of the ancient mediterranean) with the top closed up and made into pointy ears.
This guy is fascinating (even the cat thinks so!)-- it’s probably a deer of some sort, based on the antlers. But it’s also got both a tiny tail a the back, and a pretend spout, so it’s a rattle that’s designed to look like an askos (pitcher) that’s designed to look like a deer.
This pig has 3 legs!