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Saturday 25 February 2017

Pillow

The first people to use pillows were those who lived in early civilizations of Mesopotamia around 7,000 BC. During this time, the number of pillows symbolized status so the more pillows one owned the more affluence he or she held.

The ancient Egyptians used pillows made of wood or stone to rest the head of their mummies.

An ancient Egyptian wooden pillow. By http://wellcomeimages.org

Alexander the Great always kept a copy of Homer's Iliad under his pillow at night.

The Greeks and Romans got the idea of filling pillows with straw.

After a feast many Romans would sleep on costly saffron-filled pillows in the belief that they would avoid a hangover.

In China porcelain pillows first appeared in the Sui Dynasty (581-618) and their mass production began in the Tang Dynasty (618-907).

The Chinese decorated their pillows by making them different shapes and by painting pictures of animals, humans, and plants on them during the Song, Jin, and Yuan dynasties between the 10th and 14th century.

 pottery pillow from the Jīn dynasty (1115–1234

In the Middle Ages sprigs of rosemary were kept on pillows to prevent nightmares.

King Henry VIII of England once banned pillows for everyone except pregnant women.

In Elizabethan England the middle classes had a mattress and a sack of chaff to rest their head on. Pillows were only for women in childbirth.

Hours before being assassinated on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. took part in a motel pillow fight with other civil rights leaders.

In 2010, a Korean man fell in love and married a life-sized pillow adorned with a cartoon character named Fate Testarossa on it.

West Point banned an annual pillow fight held by first year cadets after it devolved into a “bloody clash” in 2015. 30 people were injured, including 24 diagnosed with concussions. A report said upper-class cadets did not take proper control of the fight to ensure the safety of first years.

War Horse author Michael Morpurgo writes all his books lying in bed propped up on pillows "because that’s what Robert Louis Stevenson did".


10% of the weight of a 2-year-old pillow can be composed of dead dust mites and their droppings.

Sleep wrinkles, formed when your face is pressed against a pillow at night, can become permanent with age and can't be erased with Botox.

Polar bears sometimes make pillows out of snow before they fall asleep.

Giraffes sleep using their own backsides as pillows

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