Tables rose from Egyptian stone platforms to drop leaves
A table lifts a flat top on one to four legs, sometimes more, for working, eating or setting things down. Most stand eighteen to thirty inches high to suit the seats beside them. Egyptians raised wood and alabaster platforms around 2500 BC, and Greeks pushed their dining tables under a bed once the meal was over.
Some of the earliest known tables are Egyptian, from around 2500 BC. Many were little more than stone platforms that kept objects off the floor, though a few wooden ones survive in tombs, and Egyptians ate from big plates set on pedestals and played on raised boards. Early Chinese tables served writing and painting, while Mesopotamians worked theirs in metal. Greeks and Romans used tables far more, above all at meals, making them of marble, wood, bronze or silver with elaborate legs; the Romans brought the large semicircular mensa lunata to Italy, and Plutarch mentions tables among the Persians.
Medieval furniture is known mostly through what nobles owned. Byzantine tables of wood or metal usually stood on four feet joined by X-shaped stretchers, dining tables tended to be big and round or semicircular, and a small round table paired with a lectern made a favourite writing desk. In western Europe tables were often boards on trestles, carried away after the meal; Charlemagne's three silver tables and one gold one were probably wooden tops clad in precious metal. Dining at several small tables, often assumed to be modern, was practised in French châteaux by the thirteenth century, and long refectory tables grew out of the trestle by the seventeenth.
The English word descends from Old English tabele, from Latin tabula, a plank, which pushed aside the older word bord; French influence fixed the spelling. Tables may rest on four legs, three, one heavy pedestal or a wall bracket, and many grow with inserted leaves or hinged flaps. Pier or console tables sit against walls, gateleg tables prop their leaves on swinging legs, nested sets stack by size for occasional use such as tea parties, and drafting tables tilt for technical drawing.
Specialised designs multiplied in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Loo tables, first built for the card game of that name, had tilting tops so they could be tucked into corners, and the later birdcage version could spin as well. Pembroke drop-leaf tables, sometimes credited to Henry Herbert, 9th Earl of Pembroke (1693–1751), served tea, meals and writing, while work tables kept sewing kit in partitioned drawers. Billiard tables use cloth-covered slate, and table tennis tables are coated masonite divided by a low net.
Source: Table (furniture)
