Grass bedding from 200,000 years ago rewrote sleep archaeology
A bed is furniture for sleep, rest, and ease. In August 2020 scientists reported the oldest known grass bedding at least 200,000 years old—far earlier than prior records—while Sibudu Cave in South Africa preserves bedding layers around 3600 BC of sedge topped with Cryptocarya leaves.
Early beds were heaps of straw, palm leaves, animal skins or dried bracken, and the key advance was lifting them off the ground away from drafts, dirt and pests. At Sibudu Cave in South Africa, layers of sedge were topped with leaves of Cryptocarya. In a preserved village in northern Scotland, raised stone boxes that probably held soft fillings date from between 3200 and 2200 BC.
Homer's Odyssey has Odysseus build the marriage bed for himself and Penelope from the trunk of a great olive tree still rooted in place, inlaid with gold, silver and ivory. Egyptian elites slept on high, sometimes gilded wooden bedsteads climbed by steps, resting their heads on semi-cylindrical supports of stone, wood or metal. Romans stuffed mattresses with reeds, hay or wool, switching to feathers late in the Republic, and kept separate beds for marriage, for dining while lying on the left side three to a couch, and for carrying the dead to the pyre.
Medieval European beds were stacks of mattresses stuffed with straw, chaff, horsehair, wool or down, softest on top, and the word 'bed' covered the whole pile, which could be packed away by day. In the 14th century rich hangings of silk, velvet and cloth of gold hid the woodwork, and by the 15th century beds reached 2.1 to 2.4 metres long. Louis XIV's palace inventories list 413 beds, and iron bedsteads of the 18th century were advertised as free of the insects that plagued wooden ones.
The Great Bed of Ware, made around 1580 and mentioned in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, measures 3.26 by 3.38 metres and now sits in London's Victoria and Albert Museum. In 1882 the Nawab of Bahawalpur ordered a bed decorated with 290 kilograms of sterling silver, with bronze women at each corner who fanned him while a music box played once his weight set off the mechanism.
Source: Bed
