Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (3 page)

The inconclusiveness of evidence for the beard-as-ornament theory provides an opening for the competing theory of beard as weapon. But how can beards help men fight? Sociobiologist R. Dale Guthrie has offered one explanation: intimidation. The prevalence in the animal kingdom of male competition to establish sexual dominance is apparent, with male displays found everywhere in “spots, splotches, stripes, manes, ruffs, dewlaps, elaborate tails, crests, plumes, gaudy color patterns,
wattles, inflatable pouches, combs, throat patches, tufts, beards, and many other ornaments.”
17
The peacock’s grand display of vibrant feathers, by Guthrie’s account, functions less to attract females than to overawe rival males; their message is not so much “pick me” as “back off, I’m tougher.” Among apes, tooth-baring and other mouth gestures play an important role as social signals. Jaws and teeth are the primary weapons in most of the animal world, and much primate male ornamentation seems to relate to the mouth and jaws, including contrasting colors in the lower face and hair ruffs that exaggerate the line of the chin. Our human ancestors might have been similar. Primordial human bullies intimidated their contemporaries by baring their teeth and growling in a menacing way. They might add to that effect by sticking out their chin. Guthrie points out how common it is to refer to a square or set jaw as a sign of strength or aggression. By contrast, a receding jaw is “weak,” and people might be observed retracting their jaw as a sign of horror or retreat. Hairy chins work to the same purpose. They make the mouth and face seem larger and thus more threatening.

While Guthrie may be right that a beard is a threat signal, there is no exact analogy for the human beard in the animal world. When apes bare their teeth, it is the teeth, not the rather less impressive chin hair that bears the message. Beards, moreover, can have the opposite effect, making the mouth and teeth appear smaller rather than larger. The weapons theory, like the ornament theory, could use some independent verification. If beards are meant to intimidate men rather than impress women, one would expect to observe indifference in women and fear in men in psychological tests. Champions of the beard-as-weapon theory can find support in the fact that subjects in the psychological experiments have indeed rated bearded men as more “masculine” and “dominant.” In the 1969 Chicago study, which found beards attractive, investigators demonstrated that the beard was more impressive to men than to women.
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A group of students were shown a drawing of an older, mustached man with a younger, clean-shaven man and asked to describe their relationship. Most male students—though not female students—spoke of the older man’s seniority and authority. When another group of male and female students was shown a similar drawing—this time with the young man bearded rather than shaved—the female response was unchanged, but the male students tended to
refer to the two men as equals conferring together. The beard had raised the younger man’s social stature in the eyes of male viewers. It may have been that the beard made him look older rather than more intimidating. Even so, a sheaf of studies in subsequent decades has confirmed that for both men and women a bearded man appears more potent, fierce, and aggressive.
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The Kentucky undergraduates who rated bearded men as less attractive also judged them to be older and more aggressive. Notably, the men in this study tended to assign higher ratings of aggressiveness to bearded faces than women did.
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The notion that the beard might be a sort of threat signal was further confirmed as recently as 2012 in a study of New Zealanders’ and native Samoans’ reactions to images of men. The same men were rated by men and women as older, more aggressive, and of higher status, but also less attractive, if they had beards. The researchers also showed pictures of the men with angry grimaces, and the bearded versions appeared to people of both cultures as especially threatening. This, the authors concluded, was evidence that a beard was indeed a threat device that helped scare off male competitors.
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Though these results support the weapon theory, it is not entirely clear why subjects viewed bearded men as more aggressive. In some experiments, the association of aggression and antisocial behavior may be the result of the beard’s cultural implications rather than its jaw-enlarging effect. After all, beards have in recent decades been more obviously a statement of political nonconformity or antisocial activity than of attacking and biting. The scary association may be with drug culture or radicalism rather than physical dominance as such. The best hope for the weapon theory is to suppose that the aggressiveness associated with beards is indeed the echo of primal threat signals rather than cultural stereotypes.

Recent studies have offered fresh support for the ornament theory as well. Specifically, it has been discovered that women like stubble. This was first reported as an accidental finding in 1990 by a team of psychologists led by Michael Cunningham who were investigating the precise facial features that determined male facial attractiveness. The team identified twenty-six parameters, including eighteen dimensional measurements, such as height and width of the eyes, nose, and mouth, along with variations of hair and clothing. University women in Georgia,
Illinois, and Kentucky then rated the attractiveness of numerous photographed male faces.
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Large eyes were found to be the best indicator of an attractive face, the same as in male ratings of female faces. For male faces, prominent chins and cheekbones were also strongly correlated with good looks. The authors of these studies took this to be proof of their “multiple fitness” hypothesis, which suggested that women were attracted both to “neonate” (babylike) features like large eyes and to “mature” masculine features such as a strong chin. Mustaches and beards, however, did not appear to be part of “multiple fitness,” for they were again associated with lower attractiveness ratings. The researchers surmised that beards detracted too much from the “neonate” qualities women liked.

That women did not find beards attractive was nothing new, but in one of their trials, the researchers stumbled upon a positive correlation of attractiveness with scruffiness. The study deliberately excluded faces with mustaches or beards from the experimental sample, but some of the photographed faces nonetheless appeared smoother than others. The women’s responses showed a surprising preference for faces with a more visible (though shaved) beard. The researchers interpreted this to mean that the
capacity
to grow a beard was a favorable “mature” feature, whereas an actual beard would obscure the desirable neonate qualities of the face. In short, stubble was the sort of balance women were looking for: masculine, but not too much. This result was pure serendipity. Stubble was a factor that asserted itself even when no one was looking for it.

At first, the researchers did not give this result much thought. But in retrospect, it seemed revealing of both what might be right and what might be wrong with beards from the female perspective. The desirability of the
potential
but not the
actual
beard may explain the widely variant results in studies of facial hair. Women want it both ways. Different female subjects in somewhat different circumstances may see the balance of masculine/too masculine differently, with the beard being rated up or down accordingly. This result reinforces the argument of evolutionary psychologist Nancy Ectoff, who has described male attractiveness as a delicate balancing act. Women are attracted to a look of strength and dominance, she maintains, including a strong chin and jaw enhanced by a beard, but this attraction is counterbalanced by a desire
for other qualities in a mate, such as dependability and a willingness to invest resources in children.
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Thus, overly masculine faces are rated as less attractive by women because they lack sufficient goodness and sociability.

Surveys of German men in 2003 and English women in 2008 confirmed the stubble effect.
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Subjects in the latter study were female undergraduates at Northumbria University who rated male faces altered by computer software to show them with no facial hair, light stubble, heavy stubble, light beards, or heavy beards. The women judged the lightly stubbled versions most attractive, followed, in order, by heavily stubbled, lightly bearded, clean-shaven, and fully bearded. It was clear that some balance between minimal and maximal masculine traits was most desirable, with a general preference for a shaved face over full beard. Women, it would seem, would rather not have to choose between beard and no beard on a man’s face. This result was again confirmed by a 2013 study in which Australian women rated photographs of men with heavy stubble (about eleven day’s growth) as more attractive than either fully bearded or fully shaved versions of the same faces.
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It is tempting to hope that this may be the happy ending to the rollercoaster ride of inconsistent results in beard research. The stubble theory, however, still cannot escape the difficulties of earlier studies, that is, the contamination of cultural bias. It so happens that stubble has been stylish in the early twenty-first century, and it may have been fashion trends rather than evolution that impelled university women to fill out their surveys the way they did.

Fifty years of psychological research has arrived, then, after many twists and turns, at an indeterminate conclusion: beards are, and are not, attractive. They are intimidating to some degree, though it is not clear exactly why. The primary obstacle in this quest to uncover the origins of beards is the inability to reproduce the conditions of primitive human life tens of thousands of years ago, and to understand the preferences of prehistoric men and women. A thorough analysis of the human genome may eventually reveal new secrets, but until that time it will be necessary to reconcile ourselves to the limits of biological science in explaining the meaning of beards. This is, however, no reason for despair. In the final analysis, biology may be the least important factor in determining why men grow, trim, or cut their beards as they
do. We humans have a way of transgressing the bounds of nature, of assigning to the body new purposes and interpretations that evolution never intended. Our bodies are subject to culture as much as to biology, and this is especially true of hair, which is relatively easy to manipulate.

If civilization rather than evolution ultimately determines the meaning of hair, it should be possible to formulate a sociological theory of beards. Many have tried to do so. Some have taken a Freudian approach, in which hairstyles and hair rituals derive their power from expressing or suppressing the libido. Others investigators have theorized about the use of hair and beards in establishing social and gender distinctions; these ideas have managed to explain many, though not all of the uses of hair in social communication. Recently, French anthropologist Christian Bromberger acknowledged social scientists’ failure to explain the meaning of hair.
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As an expert in Middle Eastern anthropology, Bromberger was intrigued by the ways in which, from the tenth century to the present day, Muslims and Christians have differentiated themselves through facial hair, as have Latin Christians from Greek Christians. Bromberger knew it was more than this, however. Hair could also help define male and female, distinguish conformists from dissenters, and indicate contrasts between refined civilization and primitive naturalism. What he recognized in all of this complexity was unfinished business. He called for the study of “hairology” that would map contrasting attributes of hairstyles—artificial/natural, long/short, hirsute/hairless, light/dark, smooth/nappy—and the social oppositions they were meant to indicate. Such a hair dictionary, as it were, would serve to translate a wide range of explicit and implicit social messages.

The dream of hairological theory is a pleasant one, but it will not easily be achieved. Even if the detailed patterns of affinity and opposition were worked out for a given society, it would provide at best a kind of snapshot of social codes. It would capture a moment in the ebb and flow of human history, but not the ebb and flow itself. In fact, the meaning of facial hair is most visible in change rather than stasis. Watching the film from beginning to end is the only way to understand the plot that drives events. The same is true of the history of facial hair. Following the twists and turns of the unfolding story of beards, shaving, and manliness casts new light on both the past and the present, allowing us to read the conscious and unconscious messages we send with our hair.

Shaving is as old as civilization. The Sumerians and Egyptians, the founders of Western civilization, used copper and bronze razors to tame their facial hair. Ancient men shaved themselves for a number of reasons but one of the most important was to distinguish two different sorts of men: the bearded lords and the shaven priests.
1
Each had a distinct claim to authority and power. The patriarchal lords conquered and ruled the land, while the priests secured favors from the gods. Patriarchs took pride in their natural hair as a sign of manly potency, while priests took care to shear away the impurity and arrogance of hair so that they might enter the divine presence. Sumerian and Egyptian rulers could not hope to rule without access to both of these forms of manly power. You can tell this by their faces.

The history of Western civilization began in Sumer, the southern portion of Mesopotamia, the land between and around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq. There the Sumerians built great cities, erected enormous temples, dug irrigation canals, and laid roads. They also formed a professional priesthood, invented writing, devised legal codes, and organized armies and governments. To this day we eat
the plants and animals they learned to cultivate and herd—wheat, oats, cattle, sheep, goats, and chickens—and we measure time and space as they taught us to, marking out twenty-four-hour days, seven-day weeks, and twelve-month years. One of the greatest Sumerian kings was Shulgi (ca. 2094–2047 BCE), a legend in his own day and a paragon of Mesopotamian manliness. To know his story, and the way he presented himself to his subjects, is to know the importance of facial hair in the opening chapters of our civilization.

The two representations in
figure 2.1
are both King Shulgi.
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In the first, he appears shaved and bare-chested, humbly carrying an excavation basket in the ritual dedication of a temple. In the second, he looms in a rock carving as a conquering warrior, crushing enemies under his feet. He wears a great beard and carries an axe and bow, all symbols of strength and command. Which was the true look of the great king? The answer is both and neither. These images were stylized representations of different aspects of royal power. The contrasting facial hair was the primary mark of distinction between Shulgi in his role of chief priest and Shulgi in his capacity as conqueror and lawgiver. As lord and protector of his people, a Sumerian king needed to command both of these primary forms of masculine power.

According to dozens of hymns sung in his praise, including one he wrote himself, Shulgi was the best at everything. He was a god begat by gods who surpassed all mortals in mind and in body. He was a warrior, swift of foot and skilled in arms. He was also a scribe and diviner, who surpassed all others in his skill with words, numbers, and divine signs.
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In true Sumerian fashion, he used these awesome gifts to honor the high gods, for that was the foundation of his royal authority. To be the greatest of kings, in other words, he had to be the greatest of worshippers, and in the hymn he wrote about himself, he bragged about one particularly astonishing feat of worship in his seventh year on the throne.

By his own account, Shulgi was at Nippur on the holy day of
eshesh
. Nippur was home of the temples to the chief gods Enlil and An, the storm god and the god of heaven, respectively. From this holy city he ran alone a hundred miles to his capital city of Ur, taking only two hours to complete the trip. After a bath and a brief rest, Shulgi performed sacrifices to Nanna, the moon god, in the great stepped temple Shulgi had
recently completed for him. Completing his feast-day celebrations in Ur, the tireless king hit the road again, running the hundred miles back to Nippur in order to repeat his sacrifices and celebrations for Enlil and An. In this way he miraculously officiated at the same festivities in his two principal cities on the same day. As if this was not enough, Shulgi boasted that he completed the return trip in a hailstorm. “My heart full of happiness, I sped along the course, racing like a donkey foal journeying all alone . . .”
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Without a doubt, he was the long-distance champion of piety.

For Shulgi, serving the gods was job one, and statues of him as a shaved priest embodied this part of his kingly charisma. But he had other responsibilities as well. He was also the lawgiver, head judge, and military commander in chief. In these roles he presented an impressively bearded face. Shulgi was a two-faced character not because he was a liar, but because he hoped to impress his subjects with the full range of his royal magnificence. It may well be that he shaved himself
like a priest for important rituals like temple dedications, and otherwise let his beard grow long. On the other hand, Shulgi’s beard in the cliff carving, like those in many other representations of Mesopotamian kings, appears grandiose and unnatural, suggesting it may have been a costume for show. What is clear, however, is that Shulgi wished to appear shaved or bearded as the occasion demanded.

When he presented himself like a priest, Shulgi was drawing on very old traditions. From before recorded history, Sumerian priests removed the hair on their heads and faces, and in many cases also cast off their clothes when entering the presence of the gods. Textual evidence indicates that for thousands of years of Near Eastern history, priests, diviners, scribes, and physicians continued to shave as a sign of their professional calling.
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Written records from the period after Shulgi’s time tell of diviners (
baru
) being initiated after long training with the formula “The barber hath done his handiwork upon him.”
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The ancient Israelites also followed this tradition.
7
In the book of Numbers, the Hebrew God gives Aaron the following instructions regarding the Levites, the priesthood of Israel:

The Levites did not remain shaved in normal circumstances; rather, this practice demonstrates how shaving was in the ancient Near East an essential component of ritual preparation for divine service.

There are several reasons why this was so. Like many cultures even now, the ancients thought hair was an integral part of the body, and so cutting it off expressed self-denial, humiliation, or sacrifice. The most common ritual of hair-cutting in the ancient world occurred in mourning the dead, where cutting or tearing the hair or beard, along with tearing clothes or lacerating the skin, bespoke pain and loss. In Egypt, tomb paintings of all periods show both men and women tearing hair and clothing in a display of grief.
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Egyptian gods of the afterworld were also depicted holding curved strands of their hair in a typical gesture of mourning.
10
Readers of the Hebrew Bible are familiar with the destruction
of hair in mourning. A vivid example is the prophet Jeremiah’s description of mourners approaching Jerusalem to present offerings at the temple: “They had shaved off their beards, their clothes were rent and their bodies gashed.”
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The primary purpose of shaving for priests, however, was not mourning or suffering but purification. The hair, standing in for degraded humanity, was scraped and washed away, freeing the supplicant of arrogance, deformity, and pollution. It was a form of decency approved by the gods, and it comes as no surprise that from an early date kings and nobles in at least some Sumerian cities adopted shaving as the norm. Indeed, the earliest rulers of Sumerian cities were the chief priests, but before many centuries passed, they had to combine this function with the role of commander of the armed forces. For a time, temples were the home of the king, and the priesthood served as administrators of the city-state. But as the state grew, and war and defense become more prominent in the affairs of the city, kings built palaces and augmented the priestly administration with political and military functionaries. Even so, the primary legitimacy of government remained rooted in serving and securing the favor of the gods.
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The normative status of the shaved face is clearly illustrated in the so-called Standard of Ur, a decorated box dating to about six hundred years before Shulgi’s time, which depicts the Sumerian king, nobles, and soldiers as entirely bald and beardless. The first known statue of a shaved king carrying a dedicatory excavation basket on his head dates from about the same time as the Standard of Ur, underscoring the ritual inspiration for the practice of shaving.

The Standard of Ur depicts the king at war as well as at peace. Early kings were necessarily warriors, but Sumerian rulers still preferred to emphasize their religious credentials, such as temple-building and cultic sacrifices.
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A little more than two centuries before Shulgi, however, a new sort of ruler stormed onto the scene, the fearsome Sargon of Akkad, whose inscriptions are all about war and conquest. He overwhelmed the Sumerian cities with his ferocious army and incorporated them into the first empire to stretch the entire extent of Mesopotamia. Sargon was not a Sumerian but a foreign conqueror who did not bother to pose as a priest-king. Instead, he presented himself as a charismatic, bearded hero who was assigned to world dominion by
the chief god Enlil.
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His grandson Naram-Sin improved on this heroic model of kingship by declaring himself a god who ruled as a junior ally rather than as a servant of the greater gods. As one would expect, Sargon and Naram-Sin’s propagandists endowed them with a magnificent grandeur exemplified in the bronze head found at Nineveh, most likely of Naram-Sin.
15
The intimidating warrior beard had made a dramatic comeback in Mesopotamia.

When Naram-Sin claimed, like the Egyptian pharaohs, to be a god, Sumerian traditionalists were outraged.
16
In the years after his death they spread a story that Naram-Sin had sacked the Sumerian holy city of Nippur, desecrating the temple of the chief god Enlil and provoking Enlil to unleash foreign armies to destroy his empire. This myth does not appear to reflect historical events so much as the anger of those who opposed the shocking hubris of the Akkadian conquerors. From this point onward, tensions between hairy kings and purified priests remained a recurring theme. A priestly text preserved from Babylon in the eighth century BCE, long after Naram-Sin’s time, denounces the king Nabu-suma-iskun for desecrations of the temples and their holy rites, complaining, among other things, that the king had committed the unforgivable sacrilege of entering the inner sanctuary unshaven, bringing with him forbidden objects.
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In the Sumerian restoration that followed the fall of the Akkadians, rulers like Shulgi put razors to good use to signal their respect for the temples, the priesthood, and old customs. On the other hand, neo-Sumerian kings did not wish to abandon entirely the awesomeness of Sargon and Naram-Sin’s divine and bearded majesty, which had proven an effective means of promoting royal power. As a result, later Sumerian kings like Shulgi decided to have their cake and eat it too.

Halfway through his reign, Shulgi was beset by military threats to his empire. Around this time he too declared himself a god, the first king to do so since Naram-Sin. It was time for him to play warrior-god rather than priest-king. Official hymns now praised Shulgi for his strength in arms, his awesome stature, and his likeness to a sturdy tree or noble lion. It was said that a his lapis lazuli beard overlaying his holy chest was a wonder to behold.
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This description sounds like a description of some long-lost statue, which it probably was. Lapis lazuli is a precious blue stone that traditionally decorated images of gods. Shulgi had a
godlike beard suited to his new status as the divine lord of Mesopotamia.

Shulgi’s successors for the next half century followed his example, honoring the gods and the priesthood while also claiming divinity for themselves. They continued to represent themselves with two sorts of faces, as evidenced by royal seals. The seals of Shulgi’s dynasty follow
a standard form showing the king enthroned receiving a supplicant. In most cases the king is presented with a tremendous, waist-length beard, such as that of Ur-Nammu, father of Shulgi (
figure 2.3
). Ibbi-Sin, a successor of Ur-Nammu and Shulgi, had many such seals, but others have been found that show him in an identical pose but without a beard (
figure 2.4
). The best clues to explaining the differences between these seals are their origins. The shaved king was unearthed at Nippur, the Sumerian holy city. The bearded Ibbi-Sin seals hail from elsewhere, usually the royal capital of Ur. It appears that the king adopted a more traditional, purified guise for his priestly subjects in Nippur and a more godlike, magisterial style in the capital. Whether or not Ibbi-Sin literally shaved when visiting Nippur, his smooth-faced official image was suitably conciliatory to those who told the still-remembered stories of Naram-Sin’s bearded arrogance.