One of the things that’s hard for modern people to process is the sheer investment of time that everyday objects represented in the ancient world.
We live in a world where we can just pop down to the local superstore for anything from a shirt to a bicycle to a microwaveable meal. These sorts of things seem infinitely and instantly available. I can go from wanting a pair of socks to having them on my feet in the amount of time it takes me to get to the store and plunk down an insignificant amount of money. I have no idea how difficult it is to manufacture these items, or how it’s done; the work associated with their creation is purposefully obscured from view.
But that wasn’t the case in the ancient world. People produced and maintained more of their possessions themselves, and everything took much more time. Even preparing a meal that you might microwave today in a few minutes would require hours to build a fire, grind and chop ingredients, and cook the meal.
In a culture where nothing was easy or disposable, there were few impulse purchases. Each object represented real intention and hours of human labor. When we look at what people produced, we can understand what they valued so much that they were willing to sacrifice long hours or scarce resources to get it.
So it seems that people have always been willing to spend their time and money to be able to see themselves, however imperfectly.
The Greeks and Romans had a story about the human desire to look at ourselves. In the myth of Narcissus, a beautiful young demigod who saw his own reflection in a pool of water became so enamored with it that he refused to move. He rejected the advances of beautiful young women and eventually wasted away, unable to break the spell of his own image. The story was a popular subject for art, as in these frescoes from Pompeii:
“Mirrors” like Narcissus’s were undoubtedly the first way that people looked at themselves. If you didn’t have access to a reflective pond, you might make one, filling a bowl made of dark stone with water. But this was inconvenient; you couldn’t pop down to the pond every time you wanted to fix your hair. So mirrors have been with us since the beginning of civilization, if not earlier.
Modern mirrors are a sheet of glass backed with a shiny metal like silver or aluminum; the two are fused through a complex chemical process, and the glass is covered with a protective coating. Obviously, none of this was available to people in Çatalhöyük, an ancient Anatolian site that dates to before 7000 BCE. But the people who lived there found a way to make a useful reflective surface anyway.
In the proto-city and its surrounding regions, archaeologists have found more than 50 mirrors made of volcanic obsidian. The process was exhausting; modern researchers believe that these rocks were chipped into blanks, which they then shaped by flaking off any protruding bits. They polished the face of the rock with sand and then something finer, like clay, to increase its reflectivity. Artisans may have polished the rocks with a third substance, like leather, to get a real shine. The end result was a handheld mirror like these:
These mirrors were valuable — they’ve been found with other luxury grave goods — but only somewhat useful. They were reflective to an extent, but aren’t capable of reflecting much detail or color:
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