We spend a third of our lives in bed - and that just counts sleeping. So why not do it in style? After all, we lavish more money and attention on vacation condos or status-mobiles, though neither is as important to our health or well-being as the bed.
It is in bed that we rest and romp, come into the world and often depart it, dream great dreams and flee deep hurts. Casanovas and courtesans have earned their reputations abed, and others horizontally prone have used the bed as a springboard to creation: Authors from Cicero to Twain have written in bed, DaVinci reworked his drawings and Rossini composed his operas while reclining, and Matisse, when bedridden with age, sketched on the walls around him.
But mostly we sleep. Today, amidst so much luxury - satin sheets, plump down comforters and posture-caressing mattresses - the slightest ding in the polyurethane foam pillow causes insomniac tossing and turning. Our ancestors, however, endured much more discomfort than the proverbial pea in the mattress for the sake of a snooze.
The first bed
The first bed was the ground, on which prehistoric sleepers nestled with piles of hides, furs, moss, grass or leaves. A lucky few slept on natural stone shelves or hollows formed in some caves. While Mother Earth continued to provide a hard, yet ever-available bed throughout the millennia, man gradually progressed to building structures specifically for sleeping.
With wood so rare a commodity in the desert, early Egyptians fashioned beds from palm sticks, lashed together with leather strips and strung with corded grasses for support. These first rectangular beds were by no means plain, at least not when meant to cradle a weary royal body. The bed frame, veneered with ebony and ivory, sloped down to an elaborate footboard carved with lotus or papyrus flowers, and the gilded legs were often shaped like animal feet. Hard pillows, designed more to protect one's coiffure than to promote sleep, were carved of ivory or alabaster with lapis lazuli and colored glass decoration.
Ancient Greeks and Romans modeled their couches, used for eating, relaxing, sleeping and reveling, on Egyptian beds. The Greek kline, a lightweight, portable wooden bed frame, was less ostentatious than its Egyptian counterpart, perhaps because of the prevailing democratic temperament, or perhaps because displays of wealth could be appropriated by the state. One exception is Odysseus's bed, which is said to have been carved from the trunk of an olive tree and studded with silver, gold and ivory. The bed of his wife, Penelope, was more conventional, yet covered with linen sheets and regal purple wool blankets and rugs.
The Roman lectus was quite elaborate, made of fine oak, maple or cedar and adorned with tortoiseshell, precious metals, bone and ivory; some beds were even cast of bronze, the first metal models. Sleepers would lie between mattresses stuffed with straw, reeds, wool or feathers, and a damask quilt.
Straw-stuffed sacks
Like many other aspects of civilization, the development of the bed hibernated after the fall of Rome.
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