My Butterfly Pillow: The Pillow: A Brief Tale of Snakes, Hairdos, and Feathers

An Ancient Egyptian headrest from the Middle Kingdom
via the The Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge, E.210.1900

Have you ever wondered why we even have pillows? That is, what happened in our history that we suddenly needed something under our heads as we sleep? Historians have found references to headrests in Mesopotamia that go as far back as 7000 B.C., which make them a far more recent invention than mattresses, the oldest of which dates back 77,000 years. Why do we have them?

It turns out, the first pillows had little to do with comfort. As best we can tell, they were chunks of stone with a curved indentation where you could rest your head. You used them when you slept on the ground to keep bugs and snakes out of your ears, which seems like a pretty good sleep strategy. "Keep bugs and snakes out of your ears when you sleep", the ancient Mesopotamian pillow merchant would say. "I'm going to carve that into a plinth and put it outside my market stall!" You would, of course, nod politely while you tried to remember what, exactly a plinth was.

We have found other ancient pillows, in Egypt and China. The Egyptians used wooden or stone headrests in their tombs, to keep the heads of the dead elevated, lest demons crept into their ears. As you can see, ancient people had some real concerns about various things crawling into their ears. The Egyptians were the first to decorate their pillows, often with carvings of gods or incantations from the Book of Coming Forth by Day, which we know from many old movies as the Book of the Dead. Here is a particularly useful incantation:

Doves awake thee from sleep; they alert thee to the horizon. Raise thyself, (for) thou dost triumph over what was done against thee. Ptah has overthrown thy enemies. It has been commanded to act against him who acted against thee. Thou art Horus the son of Hathor, the fiery Cobra, of the fiery Cobra group, to whom a head was given after it was cut off. Thy head cannot be taken from thee hereafter; thy head can never be taken from thee ...

Not only is this proof against ear-snakes but also against anyone who might want to steal your head. Thanks, headrest!

The ancient Chinese made their pillows from either jade or ceramics. Early on, historians believed they were used in tombs, in similar ways to how the Egyptians used them. Later, though, they came to learn that they were used most often by the living, not only to keep the head comfortable during sleep, but as a way for women to protect their ornate and complicated hairdos. They were not built for comfort, though I imagine if you used them the right way, they were better than cracking your head on a curved rock. Still, they were lovely and I imagine you'd be quite proud to lay your head on one of these beauties, even if they didn't come with an incantation against beheading.

Over time, people learned they could put padding on a headrest, or make them small enough to be comfortably portable (headrests in the ancient Egyptian style are still in use in East Africa today). Europeans appears to have pioneered the stuffed pillow, which date back at least to the 15th century. People stuffed those pillows with feathers or straw or some other plant, to make them softer. After that, the quest for the most comfortable pillow began in earnest. People sat on them, slept on them, kneelt on them, used them to whack each other upside the head, propped books or food trays on them, piled them up around themselves and named them Fort Pillowmore...

...or perhaps that was just me.

Once we humans started stuffing pillows, we also started making better stuffing for them. Nowadays, we have everything from synthetic down to medical grade polyurethane and it doesn't look like we're dong looking for the perfect pillow (though we have a suggestion). No matter which pillow you choose, we feel confident in one thing.

At least you didn't get a snake in your ear last night.