*Por Zaria Gorvett
Amid the windswept expanse of Skaill Bay, on the west coast of the Scottish island of Orkney, lies the ancient village of Skara Brae. This labyrinth of diffuse green mounds – large one-room houses surrounded by thick grass-covered walls and connected by covered stone walkways – was abandoned about 4,500 years ago.
But within each residence are two objects that are still familiar to modern eyes: the beds.
The dwellings in Skara Brae, in the far north of Scotland, have mostly the same configuration: a room of approximately 40 square meters with a central fireplace and an assortment of prehistoric furniture.
Next to the storage boxes and dressers with shelves, there are two rectangular enclosures, about the length of a human being. Like most artifacts found on this treeless island, these prehistoric beds are made of cold, hard stone slabs.
And yet, with high headboards and raised sides, they have an instantly recognizable shape. Leaving aside the ancient inscriptions that some have, and some skeleton hidden underneath, perhaps they could almost belong to the 21st century.
Humans have been making beds for hundreds of thousands of years. In the book “What we did in bed: a horizontal story” (What We Did in Bed: A Horizontal History), anthropologist Brian Fagan of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and archaeologist Nadia Durrani trace its development from the beginning.
For most of our species’ existence, sleeping spaces are thought to have consisted of deep mounds of carefully layered foliage topped with soft, pest-resistant leaves.
Then they started the first bed frames appeared. The Skara Brae sandstone beds are among the oldest ever found, along with a series of impressions left in the ground at the Durrington Walls settlement near Stonehenge, England: the spectral outlines of long-vanished wooden boxes , where the builders of that monument may have once slept.
Bed frames emerged just over 5000 years ago, shortly after other pioneering technologies such as writing, and appeared in several places around the same time.
About 2,735 kilometers from Orkney, in Malta, ritualized burial tunnels have revealed evidence of early incarnations of this furniture, including a clay figure of a woman sleeping peacefully on her side, with one hand under her head, on a simple raised platform.
These first beds were not just places to rest. According to Fagan and Durrani, they often had deep symbolic meanings and links to the afterlife.
In the millennia since then, The bed has evolved into many different forms, reflecting the beliefs and practical concerns of the cultures in which people found themselves.
Below we present a brief history of these temples of sleep, at least in the Western world.
When Howard Carter broke the plaster door of Pharaoh Tut’s tomb in 1922, he was greeted with a glittering trove of gold objects, and six of them were beds.
Among the disorderly assortment of objects, which had been returned at random after two ancient thefts, included a funerary bed decorated with the effigy of the cow goddess Mehet-weret, a gilded wooden bed, and a practical travel cot with a revolutionary folding design that may have been the first of its kind.
Like most ancient Egyptian beds made for wealthy elites, Tutankhamun’s consist primarily of a wooden frame with a base woven from reeds or ropes.
And as was customary at that time, the young king would have rested his sleepy head each night on a stiff, elevated headrest instead of a soft pillow.
This system was often found in hot climates, where air circulation could have improved.
It might also have been attractive as a way to protect carefully crafted hairstyles: ancient Egyptians, including Tut’s own grandmother, sometimes wore curly or braided styles.
In ancient Rome, as in many societies, where people slept depended on their social status.
While some slaves wrapped themselves up each night on a mat of dried leaves or animal skins, or simply curled up on the bare ground, others felt more comfortable.
In 2021, archaeologists were excavating the grounds of an ancient villa in Civita Giuliana, a suburb of the Roman city of Pompeii, when they discovered a bedroom that had remained frozen in time for almost 2,000 years.
Among a pile of containers, wooden chests, and other items, there were three beds and, beneath them, storage jars containing the remains of mice that had been living beneath them.
They were made of wooden poles tied with thin ropes arranged like nets, they had no mattresses and were instead covered with loose blankets.
On the other hand, wealthy citizens had more beds than they could use.
The Romans invented a broad taxonomy of different types of bedding for a variety of different activities, including bed lubrator to study, the a brilliant bed For newlywed couples, the dining room bed to rest and eat in common and the bedroom bed for sleeping.
They even had a bed dedicated to funerals. Most of these beds consisted of a raised platform made of metal, topped with a thin mattress.
In the 17th century, Europeans had a wide universe of beds to choose from.
There were beds with drawers, beds tied with ropes (which had to be tensioned regularly), and elaborate four-poster wooden beds, such as the Great Ware Bed, which reportedly once slept 52 people.
But A basic ingredient of early modern bedding was the “mattress.”
These simple sacks, which sometimes reached gigantic proportions, were made of strong, tightly woven materials such as linen.
They could be filled with a wide variety of materials, from feathers to straw.
The specific packaging material used could have a profound impact on the quality of sleep of the inhabitants.
According to the book “At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime” (At the End of the Day: A History of the Night Hours) a traveler passing through Switzerland in 1646 complained bitterly of having to spend the night in a bed stuffed with leaves, which “made a rustling noise” and pricked his skin. through the fabric.
Although cloth mattresses were regularly aired (or at least they were supposed to be), they were ideal breeding grounds for insects.
Combined with the common habit at the time of sharing a bed with many other people, including complete strangers, they often ended up with formidable infestations.
By the 19th century, inequality in England had reached a record high, as the working classes struggled to make ends meet in the new industrialized economy.
This, combined with rapid population growth, caused an epidemic of homelessness in towns and cities.
In London, charities proposed some unorthodox solutions. One of them was the “fourpenny coffin”: coffin-shaped boxes, arranged in rows, in which people could pay fourpence to sleep in them.
Another was the rope bed, also known as the “two-cent hangover,” which involved sitting on a community bench and bending over a long rope, along with hundreds of other people, until the morning when it was cut, abruptly waking up anyone who was still sleeping.
This is a possible explanation of the origin of the word “hangover” (which in English is hangover “colgar sobre”).
However, for those on the other end of the financial spectrum, his sleep was about to improve significantly.
At the end of the 20th century, a German inventor filed a patent for the first coil spring mattress, and since then the dream has never been the same.
Today there are more options than ever, with foam beds, water beds, heated beds, futons, bunk beds, ottoman beds, canopy beds… the list goes on.
We can only wonder what the inhabitants of Skara Brae would have thought of them.
