The year is 100 CE, and 11-year-old Julia Lucilla is playing with her ivory doll, Pompeia.
Named after the Roman Emperor Trajan's wife, Pompeia is only 20 centimeters tall with joints at her arms, legs, knees, and elbows, and a bevy of miniature clothes and accessories.
With her doll in hand, Julia hosts elaborate dinner parties, helps Aeneas escape Troy, and accompanies her father on work trips to Egypt.
This ancient scene is likely familiar to any modern parent, and that's because kids have been going on imaginary adventures with their toys for thousands of years.
While the most common ancient playthings would likely have been sticks and rocks, evidence of their use for play is archeologically invisible.
However, archeologists have found material, visual, and written evidence for toys across the ancient world.
In Anatolia, circa 3000 BCE, miniature toy carriages raced through the dirt at the hands of energetic youngsters.
A thousand years later in the Indus Valley, a toddler giggled gleefully at the chirping sound created by their dove-shaped terracotta whistle.
Alongside whistles and wheeled toys, dolls are another common ancient plaything, though they can be a little harder to identify.
While some archeologists think ancient female figurines found across Afro-Eurasia may have been children's toys, others believe them to be sacred fertility idols.
