Speaking of pillows, many people must be no strangers, almost everyone can be said to be a necessity to sleep peacefully. The early appearance of pillows is actually beyond the imagination of many people, as early as hundreds of thousands of years ago, there have been prototypes of pillows, and gradually in the development process of condensing the wisdom of different eras, more vividly carrying the cultural concepts of the ancients.
In the five thousand years of China, there is a word about pillows that can be said to be familiar, that is, "sit back and relax". This idiom naturally has its basis in reality, not only indicating that the ancient pillows were higher, but also carrying the corresponding social culture.
So why did not only the ancient Chinese like to sleep on high and hard pillows, but also the ancient Westerners? Were the ancients really more "head iron" than modern people?
This has to start with the origin of the pillow. According to records, as early as the Paleolithic Age (about 200,000 to 300,000 years ago), the prototype of the pillow has appeared. In the last century, for example, a European team of archaeologists found a complete male skeleton in a Neanderthal-inhabited cave site in France, with his head resting in a polished smooth flint.
Of course, objectively speaking, the pillows of that era were still very rough, often just stones, sticks or hay collected by early humans at random. If you look at the literature, the earliest record of pillow use is probably in the mesopotamian plains of 5000 BC.
At that time, the pillows of the ancient people of the Mesopotamian civilization formed a relatively fixed style, often using stones and animal bones to raise a certain height first, and then using a smooth stone or wooden board as a plane, so that the pillow was formed. The reason why they slept on high pillows was actually because the climate of the Mesopotamian plains was still relatively humid at that time, and there were many insects such as bugs, and they held their necks high to prevent bugs from crawling into their ears, noses and mouths.
In ancient Egypt, a variety of pillows were unearthed, such as soft pillows made of animal hair and vegetation, and hard pillows made of wood and stone. Interestingly, the ancient Egyptians also understood that soft pillows are more suitable for sleep, but they still insisted on "knowing that there are tigers in the mountains" and had to choose hard pillows. This is so because the ancient Egyptians believed that soft pillows corroded their willpower and eroded their "steely" willpower by the devil.
Not only that, in order to resist the invasion of demons, the ancient Egyptians would also use "magic against magic", such as special pillows when they were buried, such as engraving the Book of Death on the pillows, hoping to make themselves unimpeded in the underworld and reborn without the obstruction of demons.
Even the later King Henry VIII of England regarded soft pillows as a symbol of weakness, and directly ordered ordinary people other than pregnant women not to use soft pillows.
Of course, if you want to say that the pillow culture is colorful, it must be counted as Chinese civilization. According to historical records, although the word pillow was first proposed by Cao Cao during the Three Kingdoms period, the time of hard pillow appeared quite early, it should have been in the early years of the Western Zhou Dynasty, and even in the Eastern Jin Dynasty Qishu "Collection of Remains", it is recorded that King Yin Had a "Jade Tiger Pillow", which also has the inscription "Nine Years of Emperor Xin".
However, for the low-level people, jade pillows are luxury goods, such as the ancient books of the Wei and Jin dynasties that "The Yan people He Fujin have jade treasures, worth 140,000 copper coins." At that time, the most commonly used wooden pillows by ordinary people, after all, the materials were simple and the cost was low. However, wooden pillows also have the disadvantages of wooden pillows, wooden pillows are hard in texture, and are easy to absorb after encountering sweat, but not easy to disperse, and are easily eroded by sweat stains and deformed and decayed.
You know, "demand" is the first productivity, the shortcomings of wooden pillows let people gradually find its alternative, that is, porcelain pillows, the price is not expensive but has the function of cooling off, in one fell swoop became the NO.1 on the pillow list at that time.
For this kind of porcelain pillow, the ancients have given a lot of praise, such as the Song Dynasty poet in the "Xie Huangshi is Huibi porcelain pillow" wrote that "holding into the room cool breeze, brain chill cold mud pill shock." In the eyes of the ancients, porcelain pillows also have a special "therapeutic effect". In ancient theories, it was believed that the head was a place where the yang qi of the human person was gathered, which could not be overheated and needed shade, and the porcelain pillow just met this need. For example, Li Shizhen mentioned in the "Compendium of Materia Medica" that "the porcelain pillow for a long time can be clear in the heart and eyes, and the old can read fine books" .
In the Ming Dynasty, porcelain pillows were gradually eliminated, but soft pillows made of cotton, buckwheat, etc. began to appear and became the mainstream of the people.
So the question is, most of the ancient pillows are jade, porcelain and other hard pillows, why are the ancients so "head iron", not afraid to panic?
There are several reasons for this:
First, the ancients believed that hard pillows could make people wise, not sleepy, and able to maintain a clear mind. For example, the "Tang Green Glazed Police Pillow" in the picture below.
Second, the ancient hard pillow is often different from today when used, it is specially cushioned to the neck, and the workmanship can often fit the curve of the user's cervical spine, which can provide support for the cervical spine and help relax, which is quite a bit of the meaning of today's "human body mechanics".
The third is used to fix the hairstyle. As we all know, the ancients paid attention to "body hair skin, by the parents", so often do not cut hair, with an enviable hair volume. At that time, they often coiled their hair into a variety of styles of buns, which were often time-consuming and labor-intensive, so they would often use a bun or a bun to fix the bun when sleeping, and a hard pillow to fix the bun.
In fact, history is not boring, the key is to look at everything from an interesting perspective.