If it is to be enjoyed to the full, the handmade furniture of any particular period or place needs to be seen in the broader context of its relationship to other periods and other places. A chair made at about the time of Captain Cook's voyages, or a card table made in New York in the year of Waterloo, cannot be properly appreciated without reference to the source of its inspiration, which is to be found, as often as not, in classical antiquity. For this reason if for no other, it is worth learning about the furniture made in Egypt, Assyria, Greece, Etruria and Rome from about 1500 BC to 500 AD, even though the pieces known to have survived from that remote time are usually to be seen only in museums and could hardly be acquired by the private collector. Even so, for the enthusiast there is always the hope of finding a piece of pottery or a carving in stone that depicts one of these very early pieces.
Egypt
From the period of the New Kingdom (c.1575 - 1075 BC) a number of actual pieces have survived more or less intact, supplemented by painting or carved portrayals. Most extant examples have been found in the tombs of the Pharaohs, their families or officials of the Egyptian hier-archical government, so that our knowledge is confined mainly to the kind of fitted and non fitted furniture owned by the ruling classes.
This limitation however, applies to most furniture made anywhere before avout 1500 AD because, before then, few could afford anything more or better than crude essentials. The extent to which the better pieces were status symbols as much as functional articles, is a theme that recurs in every country and in every period down to the present day.
The best known hoard of Egyptian furniture to have come to light so far was found in the tomb of Tutankhamun who died about 1350 BC, and includes couches, beds, chairs, stools, foorstools, chests and small tables. Most of these are of sophisticated design and were made by techniques which, as excavations of older burial chambers have shown, were in use from much earlier times.
The chairs are throne-like, as might be expected, and were obviously meant to do more for the occupant's dignity than for their comfort - a tradition which was to persist in most societies for many centuries and which has still not entirely disappeared. A particular feature of the Egyptian throne-chair which has reappeared at intervals throughout the history of furniture, now reproduction furniture, is the chair leg fashioned in the form of an animals leg, usually that of a lion. Similar legs occur on Egyptian couches and indeed, Tutankhamun's funerary couches are themselves shaped to represent lions.
His camp bed, which also has lions paw feet, is ingeniously contrived to fold down into a compact space, as though intended for a modern bachelor apartment rather than an ancient burial pyramid. Another space-saving device from the same period is a folding stool with X-shaped supports. A different type of stool in fairly common use has a 'dished' (slightly hollowed) seat of interlaced cords and strips of leather, on a rigid frame composed of four legs joined by stretchers and a well engineered system of struts that gave added strength.
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