On the west coast of Scotland’s Orkney Island, in the windswept Firth of Skyle, lies the ancient village of Skara Brae. This maze of vaguely green mounds of large one-room houses, surrounded by thick grass-covered walls and connected by covered stone walkways, was founded some 45,000 years ago. Abandoned. However, inside each dwelling there are two objects of his that are also common to modern eyes – the bed.
The houses at Skara Brae, in the far north of Scotland, have much of the same equipment: approximately 40 square meters (430 square feet) of room with a central hearth and various prehistoric furniture. In addition to a dressing table with storage boxes and shelves, there are two rectangular enclosures about human height. Like most artifacts found on this treeless island, these prehistoric beds are made from cold, hard stone slabs. Yet its high headboard and raised sides give it an instantly recognizable shape. Apart from ancient inscriptions found in some parts and skeletons hidden beneath them, they could probably be from the 21st century.
Humans have been making beds for hundreds of thousands of years. In their book, What We Did in Bed: A Horizontal History, anthropologist Brian Fagan and archaeologist Nadia Durrani of the University of California, Santa Barbara chart their development from the very beginning. It is thought that for most of the time our species existed, sleeping spaces consisted of deep mounds of carefully layered leaves, topped with soft, pest-resistant foliage. Then the first bed frames began to appear. The sandstone beds at Skara Brae are among the oldest he has ever discovered, along with a series of traces left in the soil of the settlement of Darrington Walls near Stonehenge. This is the ghostly outline of a long-vanished wooden bed box, and the builder of that monument may have been here. I slept there once.
Originating more than 5,000 years ago, bed frames appeared in several places around the same time, not long after other pioneering technologies such as writing. Evidence of an early incarnation of this furniture has been uncovered in a ritualized burial tunnel located some 1,700 miles (2,735 km) off the Orkney Islands in Malta. Among them is a clay figurine of a woman sleeping peacefully on her side with one hand under her head on a simple platform. . These early beds were more than just a place to rest. According to Fagan and Durrani, they often had deep symbolic meanings and connections to the afterlife.
Over the millennia since then, beds have evolved into a variety of forms, reflecting the beliefs and practical concerns of the cultures in which they found themselves. Here’s a short history of the Hall of Sleep, at least in the Western world.