Have you ever, when you just woke up and think too many times whether or not to get out of bed to go to work, have you wondered if your ancestors also shared this time of day? Since when do humans use beds to sleep? We answer all this here.
The bed in prehistory
The bed, at the beginning of its time, has little to do with what we currently use and was not even called a bed. In fact, the first men who inhabited the earth, our cave-dwelling ancestors, used to sleep on the cold ground. If we think about how they could sleep on such a hard surface, the reason is quite simple: they were too exhausted after their daily tasks of fighting animals, hunting and fishing that any place was good to rest.
if you want to know more about humans in prehistorytheir tasks and how their society worked, be sure to read this article:
With the passage of time, our Paleolithic relatives improved their hunting technique and no longer spent all day on it, so they had more hours a day to sleep. In this way, sleeping on the ground was beginning to not be enough and they decided to use the animal skins to rest on top of them. By this time logic came to visit them and they assumed that, if they only put a piece of skin the rest would be better, if they put more they would rest much better. This is how we are until the very first of the origins of the bed.
Later, the set of skins evolved and these skins began to be placed on top of, instead of the ground, several trunks that adapted to the shape of the body to sleep more comfortably.
bed in egypt
Going back to the times of egyptians, we can find an ordinary bed, with the basic structure that we usually know today, but with two curious details: at the end where the feet are oriented, a raised part was located, possibly to place a mosquito net, or prevent it from look at the sleeper from the front. The second detail is found on the head of the bed, where a kind of arch was placed to place the head in a rigid way, and thus prevent the user’s complex hairstyle from falling apart.
The bed in Rome and Greece
The greeksand therefore then romansthey adopted the triclinium, a kind of bed with a raised headboard where three people could fit at the same time, having this unusual finish to be able to lie down while eating or talking in informal meetings. But the bed itself had the same characteristics as those we know today, but on a different scale (it must be remembered that from those times to the present day the human population has grown by an average of 10 cm).
The bed as we know it today
The most significant change occurred during the period Romanesquewhen incorporating the canopy. This element serves to prevent insects and rats from entering (which used to lurk around the beams of the rooms), closing the perimeter with a curtain, probably to generate a microclimate indoors, and combat the cold. In the times that followed, the bed accompanied each style according to its characteristics: the Renaissance with Solomonic columns, the Baroque packed with decorative elements, clean and monumental lines during the time of the empire of Napoleon and ethereal and organic forms during the Art nouveau to this day.