Were There Laptops in Ancient Greece?

Let’s take a closer look at the Ancient Greek relief, which has been at the top of the social media agenda lately.

The controversy stems from an Ancient Greek relief sculpture on display at the J. Paul Getty Museum in the United States. A mausoleum relief depicts a sitting woman and a girl, who we think was a slave based on her clothes.

The woman examines what the girl is presenting, which looks like a modern-day laptop. Many theories about this being a laptop were discussed on social media. So, did aliens really bring this technology to the Greeks? Was a time machine found and someone from the future teleported to the Ancient Greek world and was polite enough to take this gift with them when they left?

Are the two holes visible on the side really USB ports?

The answer is of course no.

Now let’s take a look at the swell. The woman sits on an ornamented seat. This is people’s way of saying that the woman lying in this grave belongs to a rich family during the Ancient Greek and Roman period. Social status could be depicted in several ways on funerary stelae and statues. This is one of them. We can understand that the woman is rich from the jewelry on her arm.

Now let’s talk a little about the place of women in Ancient Greece. Women are generally depicted on ceramics at home, doing daily chores. He could only leave the house for rituals such as birth and death.

Their marriage was made with an agreement between the father and the prospective spouse, the woman was not asked, and if the spouse died and there was no son, she was married to the closest relative so that the inheritance would remain in the family. If there was no male relative to marry the woman, the Greek administration would choose a husband for the woman. In short, women did not have a name in Ancient Greece, except for Spartan women. If a woman was on the street, it meant that she was old and lonely. As for reading and writing; Only aristocratic women and women working as hetaria (companions) could read and write.

Laptops in Ancient Greece?

Going back to our relief, the first possibility is that she is examining a jewelery box held by a female slave and she wanted to say, “I am a rich woman, I have boxes and jewellery.”

Another possibility is that the slave girl is holding a “diptychon”. The relief wanted to emphasize that the woman was an aristocratic woman and that she could read and write.

Now let’s see what Diptychon means.

Diptychon; It is the name given by the Romans to twin wax-coated sheets that are attached to each other using a hinge and can be opened and closed like a book cover. The Romans wrote and took notes on these wax plates with long, thin nail-like pens called Stylus, and usually carried their Stylus and Diptychon with them.