For the last month, an interesting photo has been floating around Twitter. It captures a museum piece identified as a “spinning toy with animal heads” from Mesopotamia’s Isin-Larsa Period, produced sometime between 2000 and 1800 BCE. And with its tripartite shape and hole in the center, it looks a whole lot like a modern fidget spinner.
The comparison has been irresistible. Yesterday, Wired senior associate editor Arielle Pardes jokingly declared it “proof that there are no original ideas anymore” in a massively popular tweet. Back in June, the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute (home of the “spinning toy”) retweeted someone else making the comparison, and the university quipped that the institute is “always ahead of the curve.”...
