The chair is barely 5,000 years old. For most of human history, it didn’t exist. People squatted, knelt, or sat on the floor. Across vast stretches of civilization, China before the 10th century, much of South and Southeast Asia, the Islamic world, sitting up on legs was strange. The chair, when it finally appeared, was almost always a marker of power.

This is how a wooden frame with four legs became one of the most loaded objects humans make. From Tutankhamun’s golden throne to the Greek klismos. From the Ming horseshoe-back armchair to the Shaker meetinghouse. From Thonet’s No. 14 — the first piece of furniture ever made for the world rather than for a person, to the modernist break of Breuer, Rietveld, Mies, Perriand, and Aalto. From the Eames lounge to Wegner’s Round Chair on the Kennedy-Nixon debate stage. From Bertoia’s lattice of welded steel to Newson’s hand-hammered aluminum Lockheed Lounge, which sold at auction for $3.7 million.

Across five thousand years, the chair has answered the same question, again and again: who deserves to sit?

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