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:
Still, the people of ancient Anatolia thought it was worth hours of labor to see even a dim reflection of their own faces.
In the 1960s, the sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro made a series of metal sculptures for display in cities around the world. Some of these were made of polished bronze, and they reflected the city around them like this one does:
This sort of reflection is what people got from the next generation of mirrors, which were made of similar materials. These mirrors are common in museum displays about the ancient world, but they’re almost always corroded or dulled; I always find it frustrating to find something labeled a “mirror” that looks like this one from Middle Kingdom Egypt:
But as underwhelming as they might seem to us, these mirrors must have been worth the effort involved in making them, because they’re one of the most common artifacts from the ancient world.
Egypt was a famously appearance-oriented society; archaeologists have found all sorts of beauty products and cosmetics, and it makes sense that Egyptians would have wanted to see themselves in the mirror. But mirrors also had a religious significance, and it had to do with the face staring back at us from below this mirror:
Hathor was the ancient Egyptian goddess of love, beauty, and fertility. She was often depicted as having the head or horns of a cow, which would be topped with the disk of the sun — something quite like the mirror above. Using these mirrors, women would make themselves more beautiful with the goddess of beauty looking on. The way in which mirrors resembled the sun (and its attendant deities) would have been religiously significant as well; mirrors were often flatter at the top to resemble the sun on the horizon:
In ancient China, mirrors were also connected to the divine and supernatural; people thought that they could keep evil away, whether in the form of dangerous spirits or crime. They often had elaborate backs befitting their status as luxury goods:
But nobody in the ancient world had quite as much of a love affair with mirrors as the people who brought us the Narcissus myth: the Greeks. There are so many works of art featuring people gazing lovingly at themselves in the mirror:
Many of their mirrors were real works of art. Though their reflective surfaces have dulled, the decorative parts of the mirrors can still stun. They were objects of great beauty and expense: Seneca claimed that some mirrors cost as much as a woman’s dowry.
Some Greeks carried “box mirrors,” which covered the reflective surface with a decorative case:
Some covers featured beautiful women:
Or the head of Pan:
or Athena:
The backs of mirrors featured all sorts of mythological scenes. This one shows the Three Graces:
And this one fittingly featured Aphrodite:
Here’s Eros:
And a griffin:
Modern glass mirrors would not emerge until the early modern period; until then, people had to rely on deeply imperfect reflections. But they clearly sought out even an inaccurate reflection. Mirrors became cherished luxury objects worthy of big spending and careful maintenance. They show how desperate we are to get a look at ourselves, no matter how dim or distorted.
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