History and ordinary objects / No. 007

Ancient Egyptians Had a Drawer for Their Game Pieces. We Have One for Cables.

By The Boring Drawer Company

The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a Game of Hounds and Jackals dated around 1814-1805 BCE. Its record describes a drawer with a bolt for ten playing pieces: five hound-headed pins and five jackal-headed pins. The catalogue also identifies restoration in the set. [1]

An early surviving drawer was helping keep a game together.

Approximately 3,800 years later, we are still looking for the missing piece.

What the object actually tells us

This is evidence that a storage drawer existed by the date assigned to that object. It does not identify the first drawer ever made, its inventor or the precise moment humanity became tired of loose game pieces.

Those would be excellent facts to know. We have resisted manufacturing them.

The cleverness lies in the relationship between the game and its storage: small associated objects have a place near the activity that needs them. The drawer is useful because of what surrounds it.

A familiar domestic arrangement

Think about the cable drawer. A collection of connectors has accumulated because each once belonged to something important. Some still do. Others now serve chiefly as evidence that you owned a printer in 2004.

The comparison is ours, not an archaeological finding. We do not suggest ancient Egyptians had USB compatibility problems. They had their own things to keep track of.

But a compartment dedicated to the pieces of an activity is immediately understandable. You do not need to know the rules of the game to appreciate somewhere to put its pins.

Storage works better near its purpose

As a design exercise, consider where things are used and where they are returned. A drawer by the coffee station can serve a different collection from a drawer beside the stove. A workshop drawer might be organized around a particular operation rather than around everything labelled "tools."

The test is straightforward: can the next person find what belongs there without conducting an oral-history interview?

That is our practical interpretation of the object, rather than a claim that its maker wrote a modern kitchen-planning manual.

The container can outlast the arrangement

Today's neatly defined collection may expand. Leave room for a change of contents and make dividers removable where the application permits. Measure the things that actually need to fit, including the awkward item that lives diagonally across everything else.

A drawer designed exclusively around one perfect photograph may have a short career in an imperfect household.

History has kept the interesting part

The game, materials and archaeological context deserve the attention they receive. We would simply like to acknowledge the person who also considered where the little pieces should go.

That person was doing useful work.

At The Boring Drawer Company, we remain sympathetic to this field of endeavour. Civilizations produce remarkable objects. Eventually, somebody has to put them away.

For a modern drawer order, tell us what needs a home and the space available. We require fewer than 3,800 years of background information.