Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (4 page)

Ibbi-Sin was the last king of the Sumerian era, and the long tradition of royal shaving died with him. The Babylonian and Assyrian rulers of later centuries hewed strongly to Sargon’s model of heroic, bearded kingship, not bothering with the alternate image of priestly or scribal
power. One Assyrian king of the eighth century BCE called himself Sargon II, while no one thought to name himself Shulgi II. Mesopotamian rulers of the last two millennia BCE always presented themselves with majestically braided and beribboned hair on the chins. This did not mean the end of shaving in the ancient Middle East, however. The Hittites, who built a great empire from their base in Asia Minor between the fifteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE, developed traditions very much like the bygone Sumerians. Hittite kings did not claim to be gods, but their closeness to the gods was manifest in their religious labors. Though great warriors, Hittite kings would not hesitate to break off a campaign in order to perform important religious rites in their capital.
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Like the Sumerians, the Hittites believed shavenness was next to godliness. In their art, even the gods were clean-shaven, excepting only the chief god, who wore a grand beard. In the Hittite world, only this lone patriarch at the apex of the divine hierarchy wore the ultimate emblem of authority. This idea mirrored that of the Egyptians, builders of the ancient Near East’s most prosperous and stable society.

Shulgi’s claim of divinity was rather novel in Mesopotamia, and unheard of among the Hittites, but nothing new in Egypt, where kings had always been hailed as gods. The pharaoh was an absolute ruler, acting simultaneously as sole landowner, commanding general, high judge, and chief priest. As in Sumer, it was the task of the ruler to please the gods, preserve order, and promote prosperity in his realm. Hatshepsut (r. 1479–1458 BCE) was one of the more successful pharaohs in this respect, ruling a peaceful and prosperous Egypt for more than twenty years.

As commander of the armies, Hatshepsut was a successful conqueror. An inscription in the tomb of a high official testifies, “I saw [Hatshepsut] overthrowing the Nubian nomads, their chiefs being brought to him as prisoners. I saw him destroying the land of Nubia while I was in the following of his majesty.”
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In the majestic temple dedicated to Hatshepsut’s memory at Deir el-Bahri, bold deeds and grand achievements are extolled in word and image. One accomplishment the temple commemorates is an expedition to the exotic land of Punt, on the Horn of Africa, and the acquisition of five boatloads of tribute, including bags of gold and incense, ebony, ivory, and furs. The inscription also boasts of thirty-one myrrh trees, of which “never was seen the like since the beginning [of time].”
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All was well in Egypt, but not all was as it seemed. Hatshepsut, referred to in records as “him” and as “king,” was in fact a woman, the first female king of Egypt. Other women had ruled as regents, or as the unofficial power behind the throne, but Hatshepsut attained full powers in her own name, including the divine status reserved exclusively for the pharaoh. She attained this status, remarkable in a society so bound by tradition, step by step. Born a princess, the daughter of a pharaoh, she became queen, or “God’s Wife,” when her half-brother and husband ascended to the throne. When her husband died, she ruled as co-regent with her young stepson, still hailed as God’s Wife. Within a few years, however, Hatshepsut had convinced loyal courtiers and priests in the capital city of Thebes that she had the political talent and divine approval to rule on her own, paving the way for her coronation as king.

Some modern historians have imagined Hatshepsut to be an ambitious
and unscrupulous woman who usurped power for her own selfish glory.
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The truth is that she was capable ruler, and her ability was recognized by the male elite. This acceptance was not easily won. In particular, Hatshepsut had to reassure her people that she was a traditional pharaoh in every respect other than her sex. She promoted herself, therefore, not as a reformer, but as a restorer and guardian of tradition. In case anyone should doubt it, she had it emblazoned in large hieroglyphs on the walls of her memorial temple. “I have never slumbered as one forgetful,” she declared in stone, “but have made strong what was decayed. I have raised up what was dismembered. . . .”
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Reassuring though this was to her subjects, she still had the tricky problem of how to present herself in public and in official art. Luckily for her, Egyptian kings had adopted a highly stylized appearance, featuring shaved heads topped with wigs and crowns, and decorative, artificial beards. It was a relatively simple matter for a female pharaoh to adopt male hair and clothing, and fully look the part. For all intents and purposes, she was a man.

In fact, she was the only one in Egypt with a long beard. In contrast to Mesopotamian practice in her time, Egyptian nobles, as well as priests, shaved both their heads and faces.
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It comes as no surprise, then, that finely crafted copper razors have been found in Egyptian archeological sites. High-born Egyptians enjoyed the superiority of shaven purity and the proper regularity of their well-ordered wigs. The king alone was permitted the distinction of a beard, assuring him the highest masculine status.
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It was not a real beard, however, and was never meant to be. Egyptian art routinely depicts the strap that held it on the ruler’s chin. Narrow and curved, the carefully shaped beard was a symbol of royal authority just like the crown and scepter.

Egyptians accepted the idea that the pharaoh was a human being who assumed the office of divine ruler. It was just one further step for them to accept that a woman could assume the office of manhood. In this respect the tradition of artificial beards helped Hatshepsut make the symbolic transformation from queen to king. When she was chief queen to Tuthmose II, she was depicted in art as a normal female consort. When her husband died and she assumed the regency, she was still represented as fully female and described as Chief Queen and God’s Wife, though also sometimes as “King of Upper and Lower Egypt.”
As she solidified her hold on power, she experimented with new titles and new imagery for herself.
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In temple paintings early in her rule, she appeared in her usual feminine dress but sometimes stood in a stereotypical male pose, wearing the tall crown of a king. By the seventh year of her reign she abandoned all compromise and presented herself as
entirely male, with attributes including the iconic beard, retaining only the female pronoun in official inscriptions. For Hatshepsut, donning the beard was the ultimate statement of her power. It made this wife and mother the patriarch of Egypt.

Some two decades after Hatshepsut’s death, her stepson and successor, Tuthmose III, attempted to expunge Hatshepsut’s kingly image from temple walls and strike her from the official list of kings. It may be that Tuthmose was taking revenge against his pretentious stepmother, but if so, why did he wait twenty years? The timing suggests that the real reason was not rage against Hatshepsut herself but lingering discomfort with the idea of a female pharaoh. Rather than allow this precedent to stand, the Egyptian patriarchy decided to remove disturbing images of the woman with a pharaoh’s beard.

About four and a half centuries after Hatshepsut’s time, King David ruled in Israel. His small kingdom was never the equal of Egypt or the great empires of Mesopotamia, but David’s personality looms large in our imaginations, thanks to the Hebrew Bible. He had a memorable story: a shepherd boy who felled the giant warrior Goliath against all odds with an ordinary slingshot. He was the youngest of eight brothers hand-picked by God to lead his people from obscurity to glory.

One of the stories told in the Bible about David’s reign recounts his war with the neighboring Ammonites. When the king of the Ammonites died, David sent emissaries to show his respect for the late king and his successor. The new ruler, however, convinced that David’s men were spies, determined to humiliate them. According to I Chronicles, he seized the ambassadors, ordering that their beards be shorn and their robes cut off up to the hips. He then sent the ravaged emissaries back to Jerusalem.
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When David heard how shamefully his men had been treated, he took pity on them, commanding them to stay in Jericho until their beards grew back. The Ammonites could hardly have done anything more shocking. The shearing of David’s ambassadors was tantamount to plucking David’s own beard, always portrayed in the Bible as a sign of grave dishonor. The prophet Isaiah, for example,
referred to the abuse he received at the hands of his enemies: “I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from insult and spitting.”
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Having provoked David, the Ammonites appealed to their allies for help and prepared for Israel’s inevitable revenge.

This beard war illustrates how facial hair had become a central feature of manly honor in the later centuries of Mesopotamian civilization. After the fall of Shulgi’s dynasty nine centuries earlier, Sumerian society had disintegrated beneath conquering waves of foreigners, and the era of shaved kings came to an end. Priests continued to use their purifying razors, but royal and noble men were ashamed to be without impressive facial hair. In part, the insistence on beards was an assertion of warrior prowess. In the centuries after the fall of Ur, Mesopotamian kings favored vigorous, forceful images for themselves, as Shulgi himself had sometimes done. In Babylonian and Assyrian art, the greater the beard, the higher the rank. And it was not just a matter of size. Gods, kings, and high officials typically wore them square cut, elaborately curled, and braided.
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One popular form, dubbed by scholars the “heroic king” style, featured the “flying beard,” that is, a flowing beard bent backward as though the king were riding at top speed into battle.
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Mesopotamian kings after Shulgi’s time founded their legitimacy primarily upon their military prowess, and also family lineage and personal charisma. The king was a patriarch more than he was a priest, and great beards were the rule. Even a king like David, for whom service to God was critical, was first and foremost a patriarch. In II Samuel, the God of Israel established a covenant not only with David, but also with his royal descendants. In other words, God recognized David as the patriarch of the Hebrews, whose primary task was to win battles and beget a dynasty. Shaving was not for Hebrew kings, nor for his personal representatives.

For Mesopotamians, the awesomeness of bearded manliness was not merely symbolic; they believed that hair itself it contained a masculine life force critical to fortitude and strength. As a living, though detachable, part of the self, hair was seen by peoples of many cultures as a vital substance that carried part of a person’s essence. As such, it had great potential for magic spells, both good and evil. One had to be careful about where one’s hair might end up. Magical texts from Mesopotamia discuss, for example, the danger of witches who stealthily collected
hairs from their victims in order to work their dark magic upon them.
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But hair might also be used for good. Clay tablets have preserved ancient recipes for medicines, including some to restore sexual potency, that require a sample of the patient’s hair.
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Because the beard of a great man was both symbol and essence of his personality, its loss became for the Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Israelites, and other Mesopotamians the quintessential sign of dishonor, defeat, or death. No wonder forcible shaving was so grave an insult to David’s ambassadors. The Hebrew Bible, our most extensive document from the ancient Mesopotamian world, is chock-full of harrowing tales of lost hair and damaged beards. The story of Samson and Delilah, though it does not involve the beard as such, is a famous example. Before the time of David, Samson was chosen by God to lead Israel as a “judge,” or temporary war leader. An angel told his parents that Samson would, from his birth, be a “Nazirite”—someone specially dedicated to God’s service—and instructed them that, as a sign of his commitment, no razor was to touch his hair. So long as his hair grew, he would be a man favored of God, bestowed with extraordinary and unconquerable strength.
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According to the account in Judges, Samson did not take his Nazirite vow seriously. He repeatedly failed to accomplish his mission to defeat the enemy Philistines. Even worse, he married a Philistine woman, Delilah. He should have been more careful, because it was her nefarious intent to discover the secret of her husband’s strength and to betray him to her people. Samson fended off Delilah’s questions until finally, nagged to the point of exasperation, he revealed to her that his power was in his hair.
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The treacherous Delilah then cut his flowing locks as he slept, rendering him unable to resist capture by the Philistine soldiers, who gouged out his eyes and took him to Gaza as a trophy. Samson got his revenge, however. His hair grew back in captivity, which effectively restored his Nazarite vow as well as God’s favor. When the Philistines hauled him before a great assembly to mock him, the now-hairy Samson called on God for strength, pulled the temple down upon the assembly, and killed himself and three thousand of his tormentors.
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Unlike David’s ambassadors, Samson had only himself to blame for the loss of his hair and honor. Like the ambassadors, he was able to redeem himself by growing his hair back. Theorists inspired by Freud
believe that these stories reflect a natural tendency of our subconscious to associate beards and hair with the penis and libido. In this sense, the shearing of Samson and David’s ambassadors was tantamount to castration. It is not necessary, however, to rely on Freudian theorizing to understand why Mesopotamians saw hair as a vessel for a person’s identity, and its loss as a threat to life and honor. In losing his hair, Samson lost his identity as a godly man. David’s ambassadors lost their status as honorable courtiers.

About three centuries after David’s death, the northern part of his kingdom was conquered and destroyed by a new power in the region, the Assyrians. When it came to bearded grandeur, no one surpassed the Assyrians. In the palaces of the so-called neo-Assyrian empire, stretching across Mesopotamia from the ninth to the seventh centuries BCE, kings paraded the grandest, most elaborate beards ever seen.
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They were so grand, in fact, that some historians have wondered if they might be artificial, like those of the Egyptian pharaohs. Without much evidence for this suspicion, however, we must imagine that great time and expense was required to ensure than no lesser man could surpass the magnificence of the king.
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An impressive display of hair like that of Assurnasirpal II (r. 884–859 BCE) (
figure 2.6
) was an important indication of what sort of authority he wielded. Assyrians believed that the gods, having chosen a king, would grant him a suitably godlike appearance.
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Their rulers were warrior kings, and the king’s beard was the mark of his extraordinary physical prowess. Images of the king were to be venerated like those of the gods, and great care went into the design and execution of every detail of a royal statue. Everything had to be just so, as indicated in a letter from a priest to King Esarhaddon (r. 681–669 BCE):

As chief patriarch, the Assyrian king was depicted with the most elaborate and impressive beard, as the most imposing man of his people. Foreigners and prisoners included in the great reliefs on the palace walls
were shown subordinating themselves to him, scraping their smaller beards or shaved faces on the ground in obeisance and humiliation.
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The Assyrian king’s awesome manliness stood in particular contrast to the beardlessness of his eunuch servants. The Assyrians were the first in Mesopotamia to employ eunuchs extensively at court, and documents of the time regularly distinguished “bearded” and “unbearded” courtiers. Yet despite their subordinate status, eunuchs could still claim a measure of masculine power. In fact, their exclusion from patriarchy ensured their credibility and authority in the palace. As reliable servants rather than rivals, “unbearded” courtiers were granted great responsibilities, including leading armies in battle. In Assyria, then, the absence of facial hair took on a new social role, distinguishing eunuchs,
as it previously had priests, from other men. For priests and eunuchs in the Mesopotamian world, service was power, and by this means they established an alternate type of masculine authority.

Later, when the final books were added to the Hebrew Bible, the Jews inscribed history’s first beard-protection statutes. The Jews of Judea, who had not suffered defeat at the hands of Assyria, were conquered by Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon in 587 BCE and their leaders exiled to that fabled city. The fall of Babylon to the Persians, in 538 BCE, allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem, newly determined to restore their identity as the chosen people, set apart from all others by their covenant with God. The regulations in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, intended for this purpose, included a new hair code.
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Leviticus commands that priests “shall not make bald spots upon their heads, or shave off the edges of their beards, or make any gashes in their flesh. They shall be holy to their God, and not profane the name of their God.”
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In another passage, this instruction is extended to all Jewish men.
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Partial beard shaving and gashing of the flesh were mourning rituals that enacted a kind of ritual death in sympathy with the deceased. Under the new code, such practices would make a man unclean and were forbidden. One reason to ban razors, then, was to maintain purity. But another, equally important reason, was to distinguish the ways of the Jews from those of non-Jews. After stating another anticutting rule, Deuteronomy explains, “For you are a people holy to the Lord your God; it is you the Lord has chosen out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession.”
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While shaving of the entire body is prescribed in Numbers for initiation into the priesthood, it seems that this ritual was a one-time transformation, after which the new, sanctified hair was not to be shaved off again.
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In this manner, the priests would remain “holy to the Lord.”

In setting Jews apart as a sort of antitype to the Mesopotamian norm, Leviticus and Deuteronomy sanctified facial hair as a sign of holiness and distinctiveness, designations with profound consequences even today. Conservative Jews and Muslims have found in these scriptures a divine mandate for beards, and a means to demonstrate their faith. We will return to these consequences in later chapters. For now, it is enough to recognize that the Jews had articulated for all time a vision of holy beardedness.

A beard, as this survey of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt reveals, has never simply declared that one is a man. Rather, one’s beard, and other hair, announce what
sort
of man one is. For some societies, the removal of hair was an act of purification suited to the priesthood, or to royals and nobles engaged in solemn ritual observances. A beard, by contrast, was the sign of a lawgiver, warrior, or patriarch whose authority derived more from worldly deeds than from divine service. In some times and places, particularly Sumer and Egypt, shaved gentility was preferred for kings and laymen, so that they might project a quality of divine favor. The beard never lost its association with manly dominion, however. Even in well-shorn Egypt, the pharaohs strapped on ornamental beards to elevate themselves above the level of ordinary men. Sumerian kings like Shulgi and Ibbi-Sin maneuvered to have it both ways, showing one face or another to suit the circumstance. Over time, the emphasis on shaved purity faded in Mesopotamia, while hair was invested with increasing religious and social significance. Hair was proof of life, divine favor, dignity, and strength, and its loss entailed dishonor and destruction. The Hebrews carried this logic to its furthest extent, reversing ancient formulas and declaring the preservation of beards, not their removal, to be a sign of purity and devotion. Beards triumphed. Yet just two centuries after Leviticus insisted on its preservation, manly hair was attacked by one of the world’s greatest conquerors.