Tuesday, January 09, 2018

The first stairs and the first upstairs

Which came first, stairs or upstairs (by which I mean multi-storey buildings)?

Maybe they could make multi-storey buildings with ramps or ropes to climb? Or ladders?  (Do ladders count as stairs? They seem like a fairly complex and creative invention in and of themselves.)

Or did someone invent stairs (to where?) and then later someone else thought "Hey, if we put these in a building, we can have a room on top of another room!"

I wonder how much instruction people needed to figure out the first stairs? I wonder if their purpose was readily apparent to the uninformed onlooker? I wonder if they seemed incredibly dangerous or unnatural to some people?

3 comments:

laura k said...

Wow, you ask cool questions. I can speculate a few things from my research on ancient civilizations.

Steps are very very very old. The pyramids in Mexico, and the earliest pyramids in Egypt, are stepped. And there are the ziggurats. So people knew how to make steps.

A few ancient civilizations had two-story buildings, but it was rare and the elites had them. I don't know how people accessed the second floor! I never thought of that before! I don't know whether they used ladders or they learned how to build indoor steps.

There were also lofts in barns, accessed by ladders. That would have been part of agricultural life.

Ladders are also very very old technology, made by ropes or just rungs on a pole. It's believed they were first created for ships, for sails, and viewing. So the first great seafarers would have used them -- Phoenicians, Vikings. Those awesome Phoenicians, spreading their crazy alphabet around through their awesome ships.

impudent strumpet said...

I didn't think about ships! But ships might have needed multiple storeys (and therefore a climbing system) long before buildings on land, since they can't just build another room next door.

I wonder if the very, very earliest sailors had to be taught how to use ladders?

laura k said...

Primates know how to use their hands and feet to climb trees. Maybe that climbing motion is innate in humans?

Then again, it's possible that primates learn how to climb by watching others in their family group climb and/or holding on to their mothers while they climb.

Would a primate raised in an environment without something to climb on, then later introduced to a climbing environment, know how to climb? Possibly not. (I'd rather we didn't find that out. Those deprivation experiments are horrible.)

I wish all the ancient civilizations had been able to document their world for us.