Women’s roles have changed throughout the centuries. However, there is one thing in history that has stayed constant throughout history: women and their love for their hair. Women of Middle Eastern descent in particular gave their hair much consideration.
Ancient Egyptian Women's Hair
The ancient Egyptians and Assyrians, and other Eastern nations, bestowed on it the most elaborate attention. The ancient Jews, like their modern descendants, were noted for the luxuriance and richness of their hair and the care which they devoted to it. Glossy flowing black hair is represented to have been the glory of the ancient Jewess, and in her person to have exhibited charms of the most imposing character; whilst the chasteness of its arrangement was only equalled by its almost magic beauty. Nor was this luxuriance, and this attention to the hair, confined to the gentler sex, for among the pagan Orientals the hair and beards of the males were not less sedulously attended to.
Among the males of Judah and Israel, long flowing ringlets appear to have been regarded as highly desirable and attractive. The reputed beauty and the prodigious length and weight of the hair of Absalom, the son of David, as recorded in the sacred text, would be sufficient to startle the most enthusiastic modern dandy that cultivates the ornament of his person. Solomon the Wise, another son of David, conceived the beauty of hair sufficiently dignified to express figuratively the graces of the Church.