In the nursery rhyme, who sat on a wall before having a great fall?

In the nursery rhyme, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall before having a great fall.

Humpty Dumpty is a character from a well-known English nursery rhyme, commonly imagined as an egg. The familiar verse says that after his fall, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not put him together again.

The rhyme’s earliest known printed version appeared in 1797, although the wording changed over time. The familiar melody was first recorded in 1870 by James William Elliott. Originally, the verse may have been a riddle whose answer was an egg; the fragile object could not be repaired after falling, unlike a person.

A common mix-up is assuming Humpty Dumpty is explicitly described as an egg in the original rhyme. The lyrics never say that directly. The egg-like image became standard through illustrations and later stories, including Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass in 1871.