Marble (toy) in Codd-neck bottles, which were often collected for play. In the early twentieth century, small balls of stone, identified by archaeologists as marbles, were found on excavation near Mohenjo-daro. Marbles are often mentioned in Roman literature, as in Ovid's poem "Nux" (which mentions playing the game with walnuts), and there are many examples of marbles from excavations of sites associated with Chaldeans of Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt. They were commonly made of clay, stone or glass. Marbles arrived in Britain, imported from the Low Countries, during the medieval era. In 1503 the town council of Nuremberg, Germany, limited the playing
Arundel marbles Arundel marbles The Arundel marbles are a collection of carved Ancient Greek sculptures and inscriptions collected by Thomas Howard, 21st Earl of Arundel in the early seventeenth century, the first such comprehensive collection of its kind in England. They are now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, having been donated in two groups. The bulk of the collection was a gift by Arundel's grandson Henry Howard, 6th Duke of Norfolk in 1667, at the prompting of John Evelyn and John Selden. The remainder were received in a second gift of 1755, when the extravagant 2nd Earl of Pomfret sold back to