Dissected tables of Roman history chronologically arranged
London, ca 1789
Syn.5.78.38

These hand-coloured engraved portraits of thirty-two rulers of Rome, from Romulus to Augustus Caesar, are mounted on mahogany and dissected to form a jigsaw puzzle, kept in a mahogany box. The earliest surviving jigsaws, produced in London in the second part of the eighteenth century, were called ‘dissected tables’: they had to be cut by hand and as a consequence had much larger and straighter pieces that the jigsaw puzzles we see today. The term ‘jigsaw’ itself refers to the mechanical tool used to cut the puzzle, which was only invented in the nineteenth century. This ‘dissected table’, like others of its time, was designed as an educational tool, rather than a toy.