Pieter Brueghel the elder, one of the old masters, painted in 1560 a painting titled Children's Games. In it he depicts children playing various games in a typical Netherlandish town square. This painting has always fascinated me for the implied cultural continuity in the West - you can easily recognize dozens of children's games that you or your parents played as a child and many of which our children do play on the play-ground today.
I came across a site from the University of Waterloo in Canada which has nice thumbnail sketch of the history and context of some thirty of the children's games represented in the picture.
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