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the door there are stone beds, the larger one on the
right was for the man of the house, a custom
maintained in the Hebrides right up to the early 20
th
century. It’s thought that beds were made up with
“mattresses” of straw and heather and blankets of
sheep or deerskins. Stone pillars at the front of each
bed may have supported a canopy of fur – another
Hebridean custom that survived into modern times.
Sorry to get itchy again but Skara Brae has provided
the earliest known record of the human flea in
Europe. Incidentally the latin name for the human flea
is very apt - Pulex irritans. The Skara Brae houses
even had a rudimentary drainage systems for basic
inside loos. No one knows why the village was
abandoned but just as a great storm in the 1850s first
uncovered it so one theory suggests that it was a great
storm that led the inhabitants to flee leaving behind
them (as in Pompeii) many prized possessions such
as jewellery. In the passageway outside one house
there were scattered breads as though a necklace had
broken but the owner didn’t dare stop to pick up the
beads. In the British Museum exhibition now open
there is a loaf of bread that went in the oven in AD 79
and came out again 2000 years later. At Skara Brae
the remains of meat joints were found in some of the
beds suggesting that the occupants fled during a
meal - we assume supper time but of course we don’t
really know. These ancient Scottish Flintstones might
well equally have enjoyed great hunks of meat for
their lunch or maybe even their breakfast.
Sleep Like The Dead
The Ancient Egyptians made such a creation of their
funerary rites that they have achieved the distinction
in modern times of being thought of more often dead
than alive. A bed was often included in the tombs of
the well to do with the coffin laid on top of it
reflecting the Egyptian view of death as a transitory
stage, like sleep, between life on earth and the
afterlife
. From the style of beds found in grand tombs
we know that the design of the Ancient Egyptian bed
barely changed in a thousand years. As would be the
almost universal case until relatively recent times
only the wealthy of Ancient Egypt slept on beds,
the poor slept on simple straw mattresses on the floor.
The Ancient Egyptian bed had unequal length legs
so that the whole thing sloped from head to toe with
a board for the feet to stop sleepers from sliding out
of bed in the night. No culture has copied this since!
Early Egyptian beds, such as one of five beds found
in Tutankhamun’s tomb (next page) had legs shaped
like cattle feet but later lion paws became fashionable
and the beds might be decorated with household gods
like the ugly but benevolent Bes and his cohort the
Hippopatamus-in-a-wig goddess Tawaret who is
associated with childbirth. The bedstead could be
quite high requiring steps to climb up and although
the upholstery of springy woven leather thongs might
have been relatively comfortable we might struggle
with the stone bolster-shaped pillows or wooden
headrests but, as though lifted from a Sunday
supplement world, the Ancient Egyptians slept
beneath crisp white Egyptian cotton sheets.