Dobbelslot diamond-marked rib

snorrebot

Snorrebot: Dutch “whirring bone,” a blade swung on a cord.

Someone scratched a loose lattice of diamonds across the pierced end of this rib, right beside its hole. Flattened into a strip about fourteen centimetres long, it is a snorrebot, one of the Low Countries’ whirring bones, and one narrow edge is worn from use. It comes from a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century deposit in Gent’s Dobbelslot quarter, one of the places in the city where bone-workers’ waste shows the craft was practised. Gent’s whirring bones span the better part of a thousand years. An older one, a strip of cattle or horse rib, lay in a ninth- to eleventh-century ditch in the Gouvernementstraat. Across the Low Countries children went on whirling these toys from the late Middle Ages onward, and Pieter Bruegel painted the flat-bone kind in his Children’s Games of 1560.

Particulars

Object

Flattened rib strip, about 14 cm long, with scratched diamond motifs, a hole near one end and a stout lens-shaped cross-section.

Function

Not recorded.