Disposable Cups were in Use 3500 Years Ago
Experts say, the cup has been found after thousands of years by a long history of humans churning out items which are meant to be tossed after a single use and apparently some millennia-long aversion to doing the dishes.
After about 3,500 years, a cup made of clay is put on exhibition at the heart of a new museum exhibit in London. Researchers believe that the clay cup may have been used to hold wine before it was thrown out after an ancient party on the island of Crete.
Experts say, the cup has been found after thousands of years by a long history of humans churning out items which are meant to be tossed after a single use and apparently some millennia-long aversion to doing the dishes.
The museum curator Julia Farley said, “Just like us, they didn't want to wash up”, here she indicated towards the Minoans who might have dumped thousands of such clay vessels at a time when civilization was advancing towards the Bronze Age, mostly marked by written language, palaces and art.
British Museum hopes the display of cup will leave visitors thinking about the growing consequences of our love for the disposable.
Julia Farley also informed, “In one way, it shows this universal desire for convenience, but today, we are making more than 300 billion disposable paper cups every year as a species. It is so completely different in terms of the scale.”
The Minoan cup, which is now greeting visitors at the new exhibition, is collected from the British Museum. It first came to the museum in the 1950s when a man found it after an excavation.
The small, brown color ceramic cup is visually less attractive than what the museum often displays. But as an archaeologist, Farley says she knows that the most illuminating objects from the past are often not the most striking, “discards also can tell us more about people’s lives in those days, than the magnificent marble sculptures and gold work”, says Farley.
The simplicity of the Minoan cup says a lot about people of the time. The cup that is handle-less, rough and covered in the fingerprints of unusual shape seems to have been made in a hurry. Lead researchers believe it was meant for just one night of drinking.
The Minoans probably used the cups only for a single-use and this proves their way of cleanup for feasts that drew hundreds or thousands of guests, leading to dispose of used items. Thus it proves that the present-day idea of disposable items was rampant thousands of years back.
