Saturday, April 3, 2010

Cradles? Who knows?

Apparently it is impossible to discover whether babies slept in cradles in New Kingdom Egypt. Or ever in ancient Egypt.

Oh, the woes of being a historical novelist!

4 comments:

  1. I would guess they had something more along the lines of a Moses basket. Babies today still sleep in them too!

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  2. Yeah, probably. Or some kind of co-sleeping arrangement with nurses...? I am having a hell of a time phrasing something and I'm just going to have to give up the idea of drawing a correlation between being in the cradle/infancy. Ugh!

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  3. How did adults sleep? If they had mattresses, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say that had some kind of cradle for a child... The Egyptians were a creative bunch.

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  4. they slept (at least during the 18th Dynasty) on raised and slightly slanted platforms that sloped a bit from the head to the foot of the bed. There were mattresses of some kind. I'm just not sure whether the babies had their own little cradle-like beds, or whether they slept in adults' beds (cosleeping) or what.

    Man, I hate it when you can't just make this stuff up! I can't wait to get to work on that sci-fi novel I've been thinking of writing for a zillion years. At least I can invent things like this without worrying about whether it's accurate. :D

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