As depicted in 1870 by James William Elliott's National Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Songs, the nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty" goes as follows:
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
Now, in most if not all illustrations Humpty is portrayed as an egg...
![By William Wallace Denslow - Library of Congress [1], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11121180](https://i.sstatic.net/cpW2xm.jpg)
Why is this? Because nothing in the four lines of the rhyme depict him as such...
I am going to contradict the other answer. Humpty Dumpty may not have been an egg at conception, but he was certainly one by 1835, thirty years before Lewis Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland.
There was a long satirical poem published in 1835, Child Capone's Nonage, by A Monk, which you can find on Google books, which has a footnote which starts:
“Humpty-dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty-dumpty had a great fall:
Not all the King's horses and all the King's men
Could set Humpty-dumpty right agen.”This nursery rhyme upon an egg, which every body remembers, represents, under a beautiful allegory, the easy lapse of a child from his early position of virtue, and the vast difficulty of reclaiming him at school and college, even though these may have been founded and endowed by kings.
It's not clear to me whether the footnote is serious or not — I expect not.
Let me remark that the riddle is not quite as hard to guess as it might seem to modern readers. Before the riddle branded Humpty Dumpty as an egg forever, Humpty Dumpty meant a short, fat person. For example, Google books finds the 1828 book The Dialect of Craven, in the West-Riding of the County of York by Mark-William Carr, with the definition:
HUMPTY-DUMPTY , Short and broad. "He's a lile humpty-dumpty fellow"
and an egg is indeed short and broad. So, even though the word "humpty-dumpty" originally meant a short, plump person rather than an egg, it may be that the poem originated as a riddle whose answer was an egg.
Humpty Dumpty is over 200 years old, originating in the 1700s.
Our first clue lies in the original phrasing of the poem; the eponymous Humpty Dumpty is not "put back together again" but rather
Four-score Men and Four-score more, Could not make Humpty Dumpty where he was before.
This opens up both literal falling and political falling, while also lacking references to the king, as later versions would.
The first example of Humpty Dumpty being visually presented as an egg comes from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, wherein he argues semantics with Alice. The book, written in 1871, then popularized this personification of Humpty Dumpty -- and led to the "couldn't put Humpty together again" version; Alice specifically calls out the older wording as being "too long for the poetry" within the book.
In the 1700s, a "humpty dumpty" referred to one of two things: either a brewed brandy and ale drink or a short, clumsy person (E. Partridge and P. Beale, Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (Routledge, 8th edn., 2002)). Were these the only things the phrase had been attributed to, one could easily conclude it was a morality tale against drunkenness (it was published in Mother Goose's Melody, after all) or a jab at a political figure (with most signs pointing to King Richard III, who had a great fall at Bosworth Field and was a known hunchback).
To further complicate things, there's also rumors of a siege cannon nicknamed Humpty Dumpty used to attack the English town of Colchester (specifically at St-Mary-At-The-Wall) during the English Civil War. All the Royalists couldn't put the cannon back on the wall after the section it was placed on was hit by cannon fire.
In summation, there's no signs that Humpty Dumpty was ever intended to be an egg at all, and the Lewis Carroll interpretation of the rhyme was so popular it stuck.
