Hair in History: North-Western Europe

This post came entirely as an extension of my research on the Bronze and Iron Age in Europe.

It appears to be that the best sources on north-western Europe and Scandinavia were observations recorded by the Romans as they tried to push the boundaries of their frontiers.  We haven’t covered body hair in the Roman Empire yet, but suffice to say, the face of the average Roman in his prime was clean-shaven.  So the full, striking beards of the Celts (various groups from the British Isles) and Vikings (from Scandinavia) made an impact.

One source shows that Julius Caesar wrote about the “Britons” (apparently all Celts, though this may not be accurate) that they kept long hair and had "every part of their body shaved except their head and upper lip.”  According to some sources, beards and/or mustaches could be braided, and others claim the Celts in particular used lime to bleach their beards and head hair.  It is speculated that this was for intimidation on the battlefield, but whether it was or not, it sounds like it was a fearsome sight to the Romans. 

There is also suggestion that Vikings and Celts attached abundant body hair to higher status.  A Roman historian, Diodorus Siculus, observed that some shaved their faces completely, but higher ranks left "a mustache that covers the whole mouth.”  The masculine instinct that head and body hair connotes virility, perhaps?

I wanted to dig a little further into north-western European aesthetics and found a bit more information spanning 8th to the 13th century, primarily for Viking culture.  For example, according to some who have looked at Viking literature, physical attractiveness was directly related to a fictional or historical person’s rank and/or moral character.  They would often be named for their physical characteristics, as well, particularly if they were unattractive or antagonistic in some way.  Even being dirty was a negative characterization. 

This might be surprising, based on what we've seen in movies, but Vikings were apparently very neat and tidy.  A law book from Iceland contains severe punishment for someone who pushed a man into dirty water, urine, food, or otherwise made him dirty on purpose.  Tools for grooming (pictured) have been found in both male and female graves.  I read that said other groups knew to attack Nordic invaders during their hot-spring bath time.  A Viking treaty was found demanding that they be provided not only food and supplies, but baths as well.  According to a couple of sources, the women of an invaded country supposedly found Vikings attractive because they were better groomed than their own men.  It was a woman’s job to wash and cut her man’s hair, particularly as part of a ritual before he left on a campaign. 

Men who couldn’t grow a beard were mocked.  It was apparently a huge insult to accuse a man of having feminine characteristics.  There was one ancient narrative examined online about a man who was wealthy with a family, but he could not grow a beard.  Someone suggested he spread fertilizer on his chin, and his children came to be known as “Little Dung-beards.”  Another character in the story made a poem to that effect, and one of the beardless man's children murdered him for it.  The Vikings were certainly into "manliness" as well as cleanliness.

By contrast, a law book was found forbidding women from having masculine traits such as wearing their hair short.  Some tribes may have cut the hair of their slave women.  There is a Norse myth that Loki once cut off Sif’s hair as a prank, and Thor told Loki to either replace her hair or be killed.   The most attractive parts of a woman were her eyes, hair, and arms; much else was covered.  And considering how infants born with a deformity were thought of as not human and therefore abandoned, it makes you wonder how a hirsute woman might have survived in that culture?  At least they did have razors so they could have shaved...

Hair in History: Bronze and Iron Age Europe

I started looking at Bronze and Iron Age Europe for information on societal mores in respect to shaving and aesthetics ages ago--likely years.  I had been to an exhibit on bog mummies years before that, and it fascinated me.  One of the reasons was because the mummies were so well preserved you could find their beauty kits with them, and see their chin stubble and tell if their hands were manicured.  However, the more I looked into Bronze Age shaving, the less I found, beyond pictures of artifacts showing these cultures did engage in some forms of hair removal.  This frustrated me, so I left off researching for some time.

And then I started looking at these Northern European cultures beyond the Bronze Age, and found a little more to go on.  Enough for a blog post, finally.  As always, much of this information is taken from the Internet, and I can’t vouch for its authenticity.  All I can do is try to get a sense of what is a legitimate research paper by someone of authority, and what has just been copied and pasted from hobby website to hobby website, and little more than hearsay.

When it comes to the earliest societies like those of the Bronze Age (3200-600 BC in Europe), sources seem inclined to say that people were not concerned with vanity, as they did not have mirrors to really preen in front of.  It’s certainly intriguing to think of a time when people were not concerned with aesthetics, but even though aesthetics as a set of clear principles was said to originate in Greece (700-300 BC; see this post), it’s hard to believe people weren’t judging each other based on appearances before that time.  Perhaps, though, body hair was not considered a changeable area of one’s appearance.

Still, we have tweezers and scraping utensils dating back to the Bronze Age (pictured), so obviously there was some plucking and shaving going on.  Try as I might, I could find no information on why.

Moving on to the Iron Age in Europe (1200 BC-400 AD), when most bog mummies are found to have lived, we have apparent evidence of shaving, hair gel and manicures.  Because these bodies are believed to be either victims of a ritual sacrifice or a criminal execution, they are usually found naked or partially clothed and usually without any utensils, there is only forensic evidence to go by.

The Tollund Man (pictured) for instance, was found with about 1 mm of stubble on his chin, which they suggest meant he did not shave on the day of his death.  (I’d love to find more information on how they draw this conclusion, as the skin normally does tighten after death, forcing hair under the skin through the hair follicles so it appears to be still growing.  Maybe being buried in a bag counteracts this?)  Of course, the question remains, why was he shaved at all?  Was it normal for him, or part of the ritual?

Some of the bodies have been found with half their head shaved, like the Yde Girl and Windeby I, but it has also been suggested that one side of their heads may have been exposed to oxygen longer than the other while in the bog.

Now, two of the most interesting bog mummies to me are the Clonycavan Man and the Old Croghan Man, which according to National Geographic were found at the same time, 40 km apart, and dated around the same time as well.  Both were assumed to be of high status.  The Old Croghan Man’s hands indicated no manual labor in his lifetime, and are said to be manicured.  The Clonycavan Man’s hair was discovered in a mohawk-like style, and evidently held there by the aid of hair gel made from plan oil and pine resin from France or Spain.  So not only was it hair gel, but it was imported hair gel, and probably expensive.  Some also guess that he wore his hair that way to compensate for being shorter in stature.

And that’s really all the relevant information I could find for aesthetics in this era.  However, as the Romans begin to encounter the tribes of Western and Northern Europe, we get to see some actual recordings of what they looked like and how they lived, as well as writings from such cultures themselves.  I’ve found more about ancient Scandinavia than the British Isles, so you can look forward to some information on Vikings!

Beauty: The Human Face

BBC Series on Beauty - The Human Face (with John Cleese!)  It's a rather light-hearted, slightly irreverent look at what makes a face beautiful.  I found it totally fascinating (and twisted).

Watch it here to automatically be directed to each part when the last one finishes.













Oh my goodness, when they start measuring faces it reminds me of examining cattle or horses for purchase for stud.  *lol*

Thanks, Soph, for sending this to me!

Hair in History: Ancient Greece

I've been having trouble finding much information on the Bronze Age and shaving, insofar as what hair removal meant to the European societies of the time. Just have to dig deeper I guess, but in the mean time, there's a ton of information on Greece and I've only done two history posts so far. You'll have to forgive me if I ramble on a bit, but in art history I always found it fascinating that this is where the Western ideal of beauty began to take shape. Sure, it changed a lot over the centuries, but who but the Greeks would think to turn beauty into a much-debated, much-philosophized universal standard?

Cultures leave such an intriguing record of themselves through their "art." Grecian art is especially interesting because you can see how their understanding and appreciation of the body changed over time. To them, their gods had human forms and were subject to the same challenges and errors as everyone else, so the Greeks' depictions of people in statues and on urns looked the same whether they were deities, heroes of legend, celebrated athletes or other highly praised men of the time. Studying and capturing the body was a big deal to them, and over time they became a little preoccupied with the "perfect" form.

There were critics who felt that perfection could only be achieved through mathematics, and preferred the more traditional, if less realistic and more stylized, way of depiction. That led to a lot of rhetoric on the subject, but for our purposes, let's just say that these criticisms didn't really end up altering the way Greek art was heading.

It's interesting to note that nude sculptures of women didn't appear in public until very late before our common era. And when they did, they were not sculpted with a single hair below the eyebrows--much like the statues of young men. It seems to hint that women were expected to be hairless in order to be in harmony with the ideal human form, particularly if they were of the upper classes. Body hair may have been ugly to them, even then. It certainly didn't ascribe to their preference for the beauty of youth.

And of course, it seems women had the usual hair removal methods of ancient times: scraping themselves with shells and blades, ancient tweezers, along with ominous concoctions that sound like potions from the Weird Sisters in Macbeth. One thing I hadn't heard of before was burning their body hair off with lamps like the one on the left. Not far from laser therapy, huh?

Towards the end of the Greek empire came Alexander the Great of Macedonia. According to many sources, including the Greek historian Plutarch, Alexander ordered that all Macedonian beards should be shaved so that this would not be a convenient handhold for enemies in battle. Apparently this was not an idea unique to the Macedonian army.

Some references say that shaving grew more popular thanks to Alexander, for with the practice of pederasty (older men taking younger men as lovers) ever-present, it was not uncommon for young men to shave to appear younger when they were taken as lovers by older men. This kind of relationship is described as being less about gender and more to do with active versus passive roles. The younger partner assumed the passive role, the one of lower status. The feminine one. Which brings us back around to this idea of hairlessness = femininity. Hard to escape that, though, since the female body was designed to have less hair anyway. So no big news there.

Hair in History: Mesopotamia

Yeah, I didn’t expect Mesopotamia to come up in my research of historical hair removal either. Anyone who has heard of the nations that made up that empire (Assyria, Babylon, Ancient Persia etc.) will recognize their epic beards. But apparently before those beards became the height of fashion, the people of early Mesopotamia went clean shaven and bald like the Egyptians, and for similar reasons.

Hairstyles (or lack thereof) were important for identifying slaves and captives. Slaves of a certain household often had some sort of marking--something that could be removed with a razor, because one ancient text does threaten that if a barber willingly removes the distinctive hairstyle of a runaway slave, his hand must be cut off. I also saw a few mentions of being shaved as part of their medical treatment or for a religious ritual.

But all my reading tends to contradict whether hairlessness stayed popular with anyone but slaves or eunuchs when the men depicted in reliefs and statues began to show evidence of adopting oils and curling tongs. Perhaps the two styles cohabited peacefully, but obviously it was not fashionable for long hair to get too out of control. Even in the Bible book of Daniel, part of King Nebuchadnezzar’s temporary madness was described as letting his hair grow “long like eagle’s feathers.”

Many sites mention the finding of clamshell tweezers in a Mesopotamian archeological site, as well as bronze and perhaps obsidian razors. Other sites quote some mysterious record of kings commanding maidens to be brought to him with their bodies hairless. But could that be fashion or an individual affectation, considering how in another text, young brides took pride in body hair as a symbol of sexual maturity? It’s been very hard to find out with certainty who removed their hair and why. Modern aesthetics force us to assume automatically, but can we try to fit those ideas on life thousands of years ago?

I did find something interesting in Mesopotamian mythology, however, regarding the goddess of both love and war, Inanna (or Ishtar). Aside from her ominous story and the prostitution involved in her worship, she is said to have the ability to change a man into a woman and vice versa, a kind of benefactress for those with biological gender “abnormalities”. It seems that in this area of the world, people born with intersex conditions were to some degree accepted in ancient times, or at least attempted to be explained through mythology.

Hair in History: Ancient Egypt

I'm not a history buff by any stretch of the imagination, but I love history. I wasn't one for the political focus in high school, but when I moved on to art history in college, I just ate it up. Hearing and reading little tidbits here and there has spurred me to look at the way body hair figured into cultures throughout history. I thought that every now and then I could do a mini research project on a certain culture, and who knows? It might just reveal the obsession with body hair is just too deeply ingrained in our psyches... or it might put hair in a different perspective. I'm willing to see which it is.

I'm sure some of you won't be surprised that the first place I'm going is ancient Egypt. Quite obviously, they had methods of hair removal. But how, and why?

If you were to visit Egypt today, you'd find it to be a hot and generally without much rain except in the winter months. In the summer, you're looking at an average temperature between 27 °C and 32 °C in summer (or 80 °F and 90 °F), and even higher temperatures on the Red Sea coast. Where I live, 27-32 °C is a freakish and murderous heat wave worthy of lying on a tile floor and sticking popsicles down your pants. Now imagine how sand could reflect that heat back up to you. And knowing how big the ancient Egyptians were on construction, many of them had a lot of heavy work to do in all that heat.

And not only was it hot and busy (and therefore sticky and smelly), but many of them were clustered around the Nile. Where there's water, there are bugs. They lived in constant danger of things like Malaria, parasites, and lice. But according to medical texts recorded on papyrus, the ancient Egyptians apparently had an understanding of where such infections came from. They knew the value of cleanliness. Though they may have bathed several times a day, some resources said they had no soap, and others say they used a mixture of animal fat and chalk. People would be cooler, have less odour and find it easier to bathe with less hair.

From what I've read, it seems that the extent of body hair removal varied in different time periods. Depending on the time, they might have shaved it all off including their heads, or kept head hair in a short bob above the shoulders, or the women let it grow but kept it braided. Even so, they all wore wigs as they could afford them, made of a mixture of human and animal hair and sometimes plant fibres. Just like today, the quality and complexity of a person's false hair displayed their wealth. These things weren't just fashion statements, though. According to some authorities, they were also designed to keep cool and protect the head from the sun. (Could you imagine working on a pyramid all day with a bald uncovered head? Ouch!) I'm sure having a shaved head under a wig would have been less irritating, too.

Apparently men, women and children all practiced hair removal of some sort. Wealthy families could keep a barber on staff. Priests in particular had to keep themselves clean, and according to one source shaved everything ritualistically every third day, and are often depicted with bald heads as a symbol of holiness. And when you see representations of pharaohs with beards, it's possible they are wearing a false beard they could tie on under their chin. (As a kid I always wondered how they could make a real beard look like that!) As much as being hairless was a way to keep clean and cool and differentiate from the surrounding cultures and even social classes, the men still may have felt that having facial hair was a sign of maturity, masculinity, virility, and even dignity. This is still something of a mystery, however, as depictions of beards seem to come and go throughout Egypt's early history.

So how did they do it? Archeologists have uncovered many tools thanks to Egyptians burying each other with things they might want or need in their afterlife. Plenty of razors have been found, usually made of copper or bronze, so apparently hair removal was important enough to continue doing even in the next life. It has also been suggested that they used abrasion with pumice stones to remove hair. (Oww.) One website mentioned an early form of tweezers. Some websites on body sugaring (a homemade alternative to waxing) claim it was an "ancient Egyptian art," but I haven't found any scholastic resources to support that--not that I give myself days to research this stuff, mind you.

And so it appears the Egyptians were very active aestheticians. Some other interesting things:

• They were apparently concerned about greying hair and used henna to cover this--as well as to fashionably dye hair, lips, and nails. Some sources also quote various potions to color or prevent the greys, such as donkey liver steeped in oil.
• Men may have been worried about hair loss, too. Prescriptions may have included animal fats (from snakes and crocodiles to hippopotami and cats), and wearing lettuce on the bald spot.
• You don't wanna know what they used for birth control.
• Kohl, the black make-up seen under their eyes, was not just for fashion. As with football players today, it helped reduce the sun's glare.
• Because they were evidently a fastidious people, you can bet they employed some early forms of deodorant, such as incense.