Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (35 page)

1
The significance of beards is not simple or certain. See Claudia E. Suter, “The Royal Body and Masculinity in Early Mesopotamia,” in
Menschenbiler und Körperkonzepte im Alten Israel, in Ägypten und im Alten Orient
, ed. Angelika Berlejung, Ian Dietrich, and Joachim Friedrich Quack (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 442–45.

2
Many scholars now identify this carving as Shulgi. See Claudia E. Suter, “Ur III Kings in Images: A Reappraisal,” in
Your Praise Is Sweet: A Memorial Volume for Jeremy Black by Students, Colleagues and Friends
, ed. Heather D. Baker et al. (London: British Institute for the Study of Iraq, 2010), 335–36.

3
Samuel Noah Kramer,
History Begins at Sumer,
3rd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 277–88. See also Marc Van De Mieroop,
A History of the Ancient Near East
, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 76. See also H. W. F. Saggs,
Babylonians
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press/British Museum Press, 1995), 85–89.

4
Kramer,
History Begins,
287. For another translation, see Mario Liverani,
The Ancient Near East: History, Society and Economy,
trans. Soraia Tabatabai (London: Routledge, 2014), 167–68. The story is set in Shulgi’s seventh year on the throne, according to the official name given for that year in another text “in which the king travelled from the city of Ur to the city of Nippur (and back).” See Nicole Brisch, “Changing Images of Kingship in Sumerian Literature,” in
The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture
, ed. Karen Radnor and Eleanor Robson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 709.

5
For a description of purification priests in Babylon, see Gwendolyn Leick,
The Babylonians: An Introduction
(London: Routledge, 2003), 137. Physicians were known to shave. See Jean Bottéro,
Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia
, trans. Antonia Nevill (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001
[1992]), 163. See also Dominique Collon,
Ancient Near Eastern Art
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 508.

6
Georges Contenau,
Everyday Life in Babylon and Assyria
(New York: Norton, 1966 [1877]), 281.

7
Collon,
Ancient Near Eastern Art
, 514.

8
Numbers 8:5–7. See also Saul M. Olyan, “What Do Shaving Rites Accomplish and What Do They Signal in Biblical Ritual Contexts?”
Journal of Biblical Literature
117 (1998): 614. Olyan emphasizes the importance of marking a transformation from one state or role to another.

9
Ann Macy Roth, “The Social Aspects of Death,” in Sue D’Auria, Peter Lacovara, and Catharine H. Roehrig,
Mummies and Magi: The Funerary Arts of Ancient Egypt
(Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1988), 56.

10
Edna R. Russmann, “Fragment of Funerary Relief,” in D’Auria, Lacovara, and Roehrig,
Mummies and Magi
, 192.

11
Jeremiah 41:5.

12
Liverani,
Ancient Near East,
79–80. See also De Mieroop,
History of the Ancient Near East
, 43–45.

13
Wolfram von Soden,
The Ancient Orient,
trans. Donald G. Schley (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1994), 63–64.

14
Liverani,
Ancient Near East
, 137. See also Thorkild Jacobsen,
Toward the Image of Tammuz
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 155. See also Saggs,
Babylonians
, 70.

15
Henri Frankfort,
The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient,
4th ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 84.

16
Liverani,
Ancient Near East,
137.

17
Caroline Waerzeggers, “The Pious King: Royal Patronage of the Temples,” in Radnor and Robson,
Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture
, 739.

18
Samuel Noah Kramer, “Kingship in Sumer and Akkad: The Ideal King,” in
Le palais et la royauté (Archéologie et Civilisation)
, ed. Paul Garelli (Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1974), 171.

19
O. R. Gurney,
The Hittites
(London: Penguin 1952), 152.

20
Quoted in Joyce Tyldesley,
Hatchepsut
(London: Viking, 1996), 143.

21
James Henry Breasted,
Ancient Records of Egypt
, vol. 2,
The Eighteenth Dynasty
(Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001 [1906]), 112.

22
W. C. Hayes, quoted in Tyldesley,
Hatchepsut
, 3. See also Peter F. Dorman, “Hatshepsut: Wicked Stepmother or Joan of Arc?”
Oriental Institute News and Notes
, no. 168 (Winter 2001), 1.

23
Quoted in Tyldesley,
Hatchepsut
, 157.

24
Saphinaz-Amal Naguib, “Hair in Ancient Egypt,”
Acta Orientalia
51 (1990): 11.

25
Bob Brier and Hoyt Hobbs,
Daily Life of the Ancient Egyptians
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 135.

26
The transformation of Hatshepsut is examined in Dorman, “Hatshepsut,” 5–6.

27
I Chronicles 19. See also II Samuel 10.

28
Isaiah 50:5–6 (NRSV).

29
Contenau,
Everyday Life
, 65. See also A. T. Olmstead,
History of Assyria
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960 [1923]), 120.

30
Marie-Thérése Barrelet, following Ruth Opificius, refers to this style as “roi héroïsé” in her article “La ‘figure du roi’ dans l’iconographie et dans les textes depuis Ur-Nanse jusqu’à la fin de la primiere dynastie de Babylone,” in Garelli,
Le palais et la royauté
, 104.

31
Theodor H. Gaster,
Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament
(New York: Harper, 1969), 437.

32
Robert D. Biggs, “The Babylonian Sexual Potency Texts,” in
Sex and Gender in the Ancient Near East
, ed. S. Parpola and R. M. Whiting (Helsinki: Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2002), 71–78. See also Bottéro,
Everday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia
, 99.

33
Judges 13:3–5.

34
Judges 16:16–18.

35
Judges 16:28–30.

36
J. E. Curtis and J. E. Reade, eds.,
Art in Empire: Treasures from Assyria in the British Museum
(New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995), 43.

37
Ibid., 44. See also Irene J. Winter, “Art in Empire: The Royal Image and the Visual Dimensions of Assyrian Ideology,”
Assyria 1995
, 371.

38
Winter, “Art in Empire,” 372–73.

39
Steven W. Cole and Peter Machinist, eds.
Letters from Priests to the Kings Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal
(Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 1998), 36.

40
Susan Niditch,
My Brother Esau Is a Hairy Man: Hair and Identity in Ancient Israel
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 49–50, 59.

41
For a thorough discussion of these hair codes, see Niditch,
My Brother Esau
, 106–11.

42
Leviticus 21:5–6 (NRSV).

43
Leviticus 19:27.

44
Deuteronomy 14:1–2 (NRSV).

45
Numbers 8:7.

1
John Maxwell O’Brien,
Alexander the Great: The Invisible Enemy
(London: Routledge, 1992), 94.

2
Arrian,
Anabasis Alexandri,
trans. E. Iliff Robson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 1:251.

3
Plutarch,
Moralia,
trans. Frank Cole Babbitt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), 3:57.

4
Plutarch,
Plutarch’s Lives,
vol. 7, trans. Bernadotte Perrin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 231.

5
Aristophanes,
Women at the Thesmophoria
, trans. Eugene O’Neill Jr., in
The Complete Greek Drama
, vol. 2 (New York: Random House, 1938), lines 231–32.

6
Theopompus, fragment 225a, in
Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents
, ed. Thomas K Hubbard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 74.

7
Homer,
Iliad
, I.500.

8
Helen King,
Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece
(London: Routledge, 1998), 9–10.

9
Hippocrates,
Nature of the Child
, trans. I. M Lonie, in
Hippocratic Writings
, ed. G. E. R. Lloyd (London: Penguin 1983 [1950]), 332.

10
Aristotle,
Generation of Animals
(V.iii), trans. A. L. Peck (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 523–25.

11
Andrew F. Stewart,
Faces of Power: Alexander’s Image and Hellenistic Politics
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 75. Paul Cartledge discusses the many uses of Lyssipus’s work in
Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past
(London: Macmillan, 2004), 235.

12
Katherine Callen King,
Achilles: Paradigms of the War Hero from Homer to the Middle Ages
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 3.

13
Homer,
Iliad
, 24:337–39, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Free Press, 2011), 402.

14
K. J. Dover,
Greek Homosexuality
(London: Duckworth, 1978), 86–87.

15
Plato,
Charmides,
in
Plato in Twelve Volumes,
vol. 8, trans. W. R. M. Lamb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), 154b.

16
Many scholars have noted that in later classical literature interest in Heracles as an indefatigable slayer of monsters and beasts declines, while interest in him as a man of virtue worthy of emulation and eternal life with the gods increases. This trend toward a more “spiritualized” Heracles is mirrored in art. See Rainer Vollkommer,
Herakles in the Art of Classical Greece
(Oxford: Oxford University Committee for Archeology, 1988), 79–81. See also T. B. L Webster,
Potter and Patron in Classical Athens
(London: Methuen & Co., 1972), 261–63.

17
Every
kouros
statue followed the same stylized design, meant to allow the commemorated deceased man, in Robin Osborne’s words, “to place himself as a model of humanity before the gods.” See Osborne, “Men without Clothes: Heroic Nakedness and Greek Art,” in
Gender and the Body in the Ancient Mediterranean
, ed. Maria Wyke (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 86. Some have argued that nudity in art was meant to imitate the nudity of athletes, but the reverse is more likely the case. See Andrew Stewart,
Greek Sculpture: An Exploration
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 106. Another context for nudity was initiation rituals. Many Cretan and Greek rites of passage involved young men shedding their clothes of childhood and revealing their true nature as men strong enough to fight and act as full citizens. See Gloria Ferrari,
Figures of Speech: Men and Maidens in Ancient Greece
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 117–25.

18
Quoted in Stewart,
Faces of Power
, 341.

19
Varro,
De Re Rustica,
trans. W. D. Hooper (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937), 419.

20
Pliny the Elder,
Naturalis Historia
59:1–4. Roman historian Aulus Gellius confirms that shaving became common in Scipio’s day. See Aulus Gellius,
Attic Nights
(Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1946), 1:253.

21
A. E. Astin,
Scipio Aemilianus
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 15.

22
Quoted in Astin,
Scipio Aemilianus
, 30.

23
Suetonius,
The Lives of the Caesars
, trans. Alexander Thomson (London: George Bell and Sons, 1890), 30–31.

24
See Thorsten Opper,
Hadrian: Empire and Conflict
(London: British Museum Press, 2008), 69.

25
Anthony Birley concludes that Hadrian grew his beard after staying with Epictetus. Birley,
Hadrian: The Restless Emperor
(London: Routledge, 1997), 61.

26
Paul Zanker,
The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity
, trans. Alan Shapiro (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 108–13. See also Harry Sidebottom, “Philostratus and the Symbolic Roles of the Sophist and Philosopher,” in
Philostratus
, ed. Ewen Bowie and Jas Elsner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 81–83, 95.

27
Quotes are taken from
Musonius Rufus,
trans. Cynthia King (
CreateSpace.com
, 2011), 79–81.

28
Dio Chrysostom,
Dio Chrysostom
, trans. H. Lamar Crosby (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), 3:331.

29
Epictetus,
Discourses as Reported by Arrian,
vol. 2, trans. W. A. Oldfather (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 15.

30
Galen,
On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body,
trans. Margaret Tallmadge May (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), 530–31.

31
Aurelius is quoted in G. W. Bowersock,
Julian the Apostate
(London: Duckworth, 1978), 102. Bowersock declares that Julian was “a man of ostentatious simplicity” (14).

32
Quotes from Julian are taken from
The Works of the Emperor Julian,
vol. 2, trans. Wilmer Cave Wright (London: William Heinemann, 1913), 423–25.