ABSTRACT
Children—how to care for them, how to rear them, how to make them into adults—have always been of concern to parents in particular and to society in general. An effort will be made to trace an awareness of these effects in documents from the ancient societies of the Near East, Greece, and Rome, largely using primary historical sources. Any sort of inquiry into the history of these ancient peoples is fraught with difficulties—exotic languages, scanty evidence, to point out the more obvious. The investigation of the young child is particularly formidable because there are few references in the extant literature to children before they are school–age. For Egypt, the abundance of paintings in which young children are portrayed provides additional and welcome evidence; but even when considering both the meager literary scraps and the paintings, the historian can draw only the sketchiest picture of early childhood.
