Favorite Answer

Indeed the rhyme

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the king's horses and all the king's men

Couldn't put Humpty together again....does not tell us at all that Humpty was an egg. However it's etymology has a number of variations, and it was in Lewis Carroll's 1871 book "Through the Looking Glass" (that used this rhyme), where the book's illustrator John Tenniel first drew Humpty as an egg, sitting on a wall.

An 1810 version of the rhyme also does not explicitly state that the subject is an egg because it was originally posed as the riddle as such:

Humpty Dumpty sate on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;

Threescore men and threescore more,

Cannot place Humpty dumpty as he was before.

Furthermore, "humpty dumpty" was an eighteenth-century reduplicative (linguistic root) slang for a short and clumsy person.

Look at my link for just one of Mr. Tenniel's illustrations.