Why We Shake Hands: A 2,800-Year History

A sloth, a donkey, and a curious human send a prompt and see what they're doing. One hits a record with a question on his mind. Two brothers pick it up, see what they find. Cone takes his time, Herman's got the facts. Back and forth, they never hold back. My weird prompts, come on in, that's where we begin. My weird prompts, glad you're here.

This episode was generated using artificial intelligence. Please verify facts.

There's a thing you do every time you meet someone for the first time, Herman. You do it without thinking. You did it this morning.

I did. I did do it to the delivery man, and I want to state for the record that his grip could have cracked a walnut.

And you never once asked why. Nobody does. It's the one ritual everybody performs, and nobody can explain.

Daniel can't either, which is why he wrote in. Let me hear how he framed it.

He wants to know how shaking hands became the global symbol for deal-making and agreement. Was it always that way, or did somebody way back start a trend and everyone just rolled with it? And if something did come before it, what was it?

That's the good version of the question. There's also the part he tucked on the end.

Which is the one that actually makes it interesting. In societies where a handshake isn't the normal gesture for sealing an agreement, what do they use instead? Because the answer to that tells you whether this thing is a human universal or a Western export that got lucky.

And it isn't a human universal. That's the first thing to get straight.

So the handshake feels like it's been with us forever. The evidence says otherwise.

The honest version is that the handshake was never inevitable. It won, and the story of how it won is stranger than the gesture itself.

Start where the record starts then.

The oldest image we have of two people shaking hands is a limestone relief from the 9th century before the Common Era, dug up in what's now Iraq. Two kings, Shalmaneser III of Assyria and Marduk-zakir-shumi I of Babylon, right hands clasped. It isn't a greeting, it's the renewal of a treaty.

Two kings, one image, and the whole thing is a contract.

Right, and that's the pattern you see right through antiquity. The handshake wasn't how you said hello to your neighbor. It was a special occasional gesture used by very high-ranking men: monarchs, ambassadors, generals. And the reason it was reserved for them is precisely that it sidestepped the whole question of who outranked whom. If I bow to you, I've conceded something. If we clasp hands, neither of us has bowed, and the deal still gets sealed.

So it's a way of getting out of an argument about status.

It's a way of agreeing without either party having to lose the argument, yes, which is why you find it at the top of the hierarchy and almost nowhere else.

There are two theories about where it actually comes from, though.

There are, and they're not mutually exclusive. The first is the peaceful intent theory. You extend an empty right hand, and an empty right hand is a hand with no weapon in it. And the up-and-down motion you do to shake, that was supposedly meant to dislodge a dagger hidden up a sleeve. If something's in there, it falls out.

That's a very paranoid