Studies in Ancient Furniture

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. This book was begun as an archaeological study. At the last, however, in the hope that it might appeal also to certain lay readers, some statements have been introduced which would otherwise be superfluous. The task has been a very different one from that undertaken by a person writing on furniture of the last few hundred years, because the facts have had to be gleaned and pieced together from comparatively meager sources. The nature of the ancient evidence is set forth in the Introduction. In chap, i is given a rapid chronological survey of the forms of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman couches; in this chapter some forms rare on the monuments are noticed which have had to be ignored later because of lack of further evidence in regard to them. All statements as to provenience, dimensions, etc., of the material published in the plates, and longer discussions which would have interrupted the main trend of the general chapters, have been relegated to a section of the Supplementary Matter, Discussion of Plates.<br><br>It would be useless to try to enumerate in all particulars the extent and nature of my indebtedness to previous writers. Some acknowledgments will be found in the footnotes, as well as references to some of the earlier results which it has not seemed necessary to summarize here. I have been most aided by the following treatises: Blumner, Technologist und Terminologie der Gewerbe und Kunstc bei Gricchen und Romern; Mau, in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopadie der classischen Altertumswnissenschaft, article Betten; Girard, in Daremberg and Saglio, Dictionnaire des antiquites grecques ct romaines, article Lectus; Graeven, Aitike Schnitzereien aus Elfenbein und Knochen. Many references to passages in ancient authors have been obtained from the first three of the works just mentioned. For still other references I have to thank Professor F. B. Tarbell. Extensive independent foraging in ancient literature and inscriptions, and the discussion of