Solid color napkins are certainly an easy way to dress up your party table decorations, but did you ever wonder who used the first napkins? No, you say? You don’t really care where napkins came from or which cultures introduced them first? Well, too bad, because we’re going to tell you.

To get the story of the napkin, you must first travel back to ancient Greece and the Spartans. The Spartans (residing in Sparta of course) were primarily a warrior society and not known much for their table manners. However, they did like to eat something called “apomagdalie”. Apogmagdalie was a bit of dough that was typically cut into small pieces and rolled right at the table. This eventually led to using the resulting slices of bread to wipe people’s hands.

Later on, the Romans decided that napkins made of bread were pretty gross, and they came up with “sudarium” which were made fabric. They also would use a “mappa” which was a larger fabric that would cover the edges of furniture and allow the eater to recline in comfort. In this case, each guest would bring their own, and the mappa would be filled with leftovers for the guest to take at the end of the meal or event.

In the Middle Ages, the napkin would disappear again, only to return in the sixteenth century. From this point on, they became, for the most part, an accepted and expected part of most meals. While the size of napkins and some of the customs surrounding them would continue to change and evolve, they became a fixture on tables everywhere.