PLATO
Greg Jenner explores the history of our morning routine, from a Greek philosopher’s alarm clock to bizarre Tudor toothbrushes
Put your pants on (if you’re wearing any)
When Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, among the glorious golden treasures were also 145 pairs of underpants. The linen loincloth (shenti) was standard underwear of the time, regardless of class or wealth, but its origins seem even older. The mummified corpse of Ötzi the Iceman, who was murdered in the Tyrolean Alps 5,300 years ago, revealed he sported a goatskin loincloth.
Most European men and women went pantless until the mid-19th century, with ladies wearing long smocks under their dresses and men merely tucking their long shirts between their legs. However, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) was surprisingly found to have been wearing boxer shorts when his preserved corpse was examined by modern conservators.
Dress to impress the fashion police
Body lice thrive in the folds of clothing, and are thought to have branched off from their near relatives, head lice, thousands of years ago – as a result of people adopting fabric clothing. We often depict Stone Age people in animal furs, but they also wove flax on primitive looms and used needle and thread to make clothes fit more snugly. In the Ice Age, well-insulated clothes were key to survival.
Today, fashion is more about looking good, but the ‘fashion police’ have been in operation for longer than you might think. In the Middle Ages there were laws proscribing certain colours and designs, and Edward IV demanded that purple, gold and silver fabrics be limited to royalty. You had to be of knightly class to get away with velvet.
In 17th-century Japan, a rule preventing merchants from wearing ornate robes led some to have the designs tattooed on their skin. This art of irezumi is still so highly regarded in Japan that people have been paid to bequeath their flayed skin to museums upon their death.
Spice on your cornflakes?
Strangely, our humble bowl of cornflakes first arrived in the 1890s as a treatment for patients with mental illness who masturbated too much. Dr John Harvey Kellogg believed the lack of sugar and spice would reduce a person’s sex drive. It was his brother, Will, who sprinkled the sugar back on top and made a fortune out of the Kellogg’s brand.
Of course, every bowl of cereal needs a splash of milk, but this was only possible after the Neolithic farming revolution saw humans domesticate animals. Indeed, the mutated gene that allows most of us to drink cow’s milk without suffering painful flatulence is only 6,000 years old, and the majority of the world’s population don’t have it.
THIS PAGE, LEFT TO RIGHT: By the 20th century, most people were sporting underwear, as this image from the 1920 suggests; a man covered in the traditional Japanese irezumi tattoo in c1880; Dr John Harvey Kellogg chose not to use sugar in his cornflakes recipe in a bid to reduce patients’ sex drive; an 1810 coloured engraving shows men who probably didn’t own a toothbrush
Ask your slave to brush your teeth
People have been treating toothache for millennia, with evidence of dental drilling in Pakistan dating back 9,000 years. But avoiding surgery has always been preferable, so tooth brushing with a frayed twig was part of the morning routine for everyone from the medieval residents of India to the Elizabethans.
Roman aristocrats had slaves to brush their teeth for them, applying powdered antler horn to brighten the enamel. Oddly, the best available mouthwash at the time was human urine imported from Portugal.
The Chinese invented the modern toothbrush but it never reached Europe, so the reinvention is credited to William Addis who, in 1780, inserted horsehair into a pig bone. But even Addis didn’t recommend brushing twice a day – that advice came from US army hygiene experiments in World War Two.