In the classic English nursery rhyme, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall and then had a great fall. The rhyme ends by saying that all the king’s horses and men could not put him together again.
The earliest known printed version appeared in Samuel Arnold’s Juvenile Amusements in 1797, although the wording differed from the modern version. A related text was printed in Gammer Gurton’s Garland in 1810, and the familiar melody was recorded by James William Elliott in 1870. The rhyme is now listed in the Roud Folk Song Index as number 13026.
The verse never explicitly says that Humpty Dumpty is an egg. It was probably originally a riddle, and the answer may have relied on the contrast between a clumsy person and a fragile egg. The egg interpretation became standard through illustrations and later performances, especially George L. Fox’s 1868 stage portrayal and Lewis Carroll’s animated egg character in Through the Looking-Glass (1871).
Stories claiming the rhyme secretly describes a cannon, a siege engine, or King Richard III are popular, but evidence linking those events to the original rhyme is weak. The nursery character remains the canonical answer.