A gift out of Armenia

The best construction set in the country is three thousand four hundred years old and it is in a museum.

It has seventy parts, no screws, and it was assembled by somebody who had worked out exactly how wood holds wood. A printed building set is a small, cheap, modern descendant of that, and unlike the original it fits in hand luggage.

Seventy parts, and not one screw

In the 1950s part of Lake Sevan was drained, and the retreating water uncovered a Late Bronze Age cemetery at Lchashen with more than five hundred graves in it¹. Six oak wagons came out of that mud. They date to the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries BC, the best preserved of them has at least seventy components held together with mortise and tenon joints and bronze fittings, and the frame of its canopy alone needed hundreds of precisely cut mortise holes¹. It is in the History Museum of Armenia in Yerevan and you can go and stand in front of it this week.

Stand there long enough and the thing you notice is not the age. It is that somebody had to decide, hundreds of times, which piece went into which hole and which way round it faced. Every one of those decisions had to be right, and they were, and the wagon is still standing up.

That is what a building set is for

A child with a box of parts is doing the same work at a smaller scale. Which piece goes where. Which way round. What happens to the arch if the wrong one goes in at the bottom. The answer is not in a manual and cannot be explained in advance, which is exactly why it sticks.

So the oldest thing in this story is not a toy at all. It is a piece of joinery. Children get handed small versions of the grown up problem, and that is older than any toy industry.

Den is a real animal, and he lives here

The otter on the box is not a mascot borrowed from somewhere warmer. A survey of most of Armenia's river systems and major lakes found Eurasian otters present in every area looked at, with a hotspot in the Arpa catchment in Vayots Dzor, and the species is listed as Endangered on the Armenian Red List². Den is that otter. He is also called Den because a den is where an otter lives and a den is what a child builds out of cushions.

He carries a favourite stone, and that part is borrowed, honestly and on purpose. It is his Pacific cousins who do it: wild sea otters are the only marine mammals that habitually use stones to break open shellfish, and they return to the same rocks as anvils often enough to leave archaeological wear on them³. An animal that worked out how to use a tool is a reasonable person to put on the front of a box of parts.

What changed, and what did not

The parts are the old idea. What is new is that they can be drawn to the size of one particular pair of hands and printed that afternoon. A wagon builder at Lchashen had oak, and oak decides quite a lot for you. A set here can be thirty-four pieces or forty-six, at 44 mm or 60 mm, because that is a number in a file rather than a tree.

There is nothing on any of it patterned to look Armenian. The continuity is in the problem handed over: here are the parts, work out how they hold.

What it is like to carry

The arch set is thirty-four pieces in six geometries, the largest of them 96 by 96 by 48 mm and the smallest 44 mm, which clears the small-parts cylinder. It is PLA, drop tested at 1.4 m onto oak, twenty drops, no fracture. It travels as a bag of loose parts, which means it fills the gaps around everything else in the case rather than needing a space of its own.

The slot and post frame is one 200 by 140 by 90 mm piece with twelve counters, so it is one solid object and it wants a corner. The balance beam set has a 240 mm piece in it, which is the longest thing in the range. Any of the three will survive a suitcase; only the arch set will survive it without being thought about.

Who it suits

A child somewhere between two and seven, and an adult who has run out of ideas by four in the afternoon. The gift arrives with something to do either way, because the activity library is free, has thirty-five activities in it, and all but one of those work with what is already in the kitchen.

If you know the child's age and one thing they do for hours without being asked, the set can be drawn for a rug on the other side of the world.