Two people meet, extend their right hands, and briefly clasp them. The movement can introduce strangers, conclude a meeting, or acknowledge a shared achievement.
Because the handshake feels familiar, it is tempting to imagine an equally straightforward beginning: someone needed a peaceful greeting, invented the gesture, and everyone else copied it. The historical evidence tells a less tidy story.
Ancient images show people joining hands, but those images do not always depict an ordinary hello. To understand the custom, we need to separate the physical gesture from the different meanings people have given it.
There is no surviving record of the first handshake
A historical object can show that a gesture existed by a certain period. It usually cannot tell us who performed it first or why the practice originally began.
This distinction matters for customs that developed through repeated human interaction. Everyday movements do not always leave written explanations, and surviving art represents only a small selection of past behavior.
Imagine a future historian finding a photograph of two people shaking hands. Without the caption, the image might represent an introduction, a reunion, congratulations, or a staged ceremony.
Ancient evidence presents a similar problem. We can identify joined hands more easily than we can reconstruct every intention behind them.
Hand-clasping appears in ancient political imagery
One notable example comes from the ancient Near East. A relief on the throne base of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III shows him grasping the hand of Marduk-zakir-shumi, king of Babylonia.
Shalmaneser ruled during the ninth century BCE. The University of Pennsylvania’s Nimrud research project identifies the two rulers in its description of the scene.
This provides evidence that joining hands could appear in the visual language of royal relationships long before modern business etiquette.
However, the relief does not establish how ordinary people greeted one another. A formal image of kings is evidence of a particular representation, not a survey of everyday behavior.
It also cannot preserve the full movement. A carved handclasp does not reveal whether the participants moved their joined hands in exactly the way people commonly do today.
In ancient Greece, joined hands could express a lasting bond
Greek funerary art supplies particularly clear examples. A hand-clasping motif known as dexiosis appears on grave monuments.
The Getty Museum’s Grave Stele of Philoxenos with his Wife, Philoumene shows a man in armor clasping his wife’s hand. The museum explains that the motif could express farewell, reunion in the afterlife, or a continuing connection between the living and the dead.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art also describes a handclasp on a painted Greek funerary stele as a traditional gesture of farewell.
Two people join hands
The physical arrangement can look familiar to a modern viewer.
The meaning may be different
On a grave monument, the gesture can concern separation, remembrance, or an enduring relationship.
These objects are a reminder that recognizing a movement is not the same as recognizing its full cultural meaning.
Did the handshake begin as proof that someone had no weapon?
A popular explanation says that extending an empty right hand demonstrated peaceful intentions. Another version claims that shaking the arm helped reveal a weapon concealed in a sleeve.
These stories are easy to remember because they give a practical purpose to the movement. But an explanation that sounds plausible is not automatically a documented origin.
An empty hand could communicate reassurance in a particular encounter. That possibility does not establish that every hand-clasping tradition developed from a weapon check.
The careful distinction is between a possible function and a demonstrated historical beginning. The surviving examples do not justify presenting the weapon story as settled fact.
The everyday greeting has a more recent social history
Ancient handclasps and modern greeting habits should not be treated as one unchanged tradition.
Historical research on early modern England examines handshaking as a meaningful social and political action. It could express a relationship between participants rather than merely accompany polite words.
Quakers are an important part of this history. In seventeenth-century England, they rejected deferential practices such as bowing and removing hats as forms of honoring social rank. Their use of handshaking is associated with an alternative approach to greeting.
That does not mean Quakers invented joining hands. The ancient evidence rules out such a simple claim. Their importance concerns how an existing gesture could acquire a particular social purpose.
Research published in the journal Urban History examines the handshake’s wider spread in Britain between 1700 and 1850. This places its development within changing social relationships and urban life, rather than attributing it to one inventor.
A custom can therefore be ancient in physical form while more recent in its role as a routine greeting.
The same movement can carry several messages
Consider a few hypothetical situations: two colleagues meet for the first time, two competitors acknowledge a completed match, or two friends reconcile after a disagreement.
Each encounter could include a handshake, but the surrounding circumstances supply different meanings. The movement does not contain a single fixed message.
| Context | What the gesture can communicate |
|---|---|
| An introduction | Acknowledgment and willingness to interact. |
| A farewell | Recognition of a departure or separation. |
| A ceremonial agreement | A visible expression of cooperation. |
| Ancient funerary imagery | A bond, farewell, or connection beyond death. |
Roman objects provide another example of symbolic use. The Ashmolean Museum catalogs coins that pair clasped hands with inscriptions referring to Concordia, or concord. Here, joined hands form part of an image of agreement or unity.
Three misunderstandings to avoid
- “One civilization invented the modern handshake.” An early depiction establishes a historical example, not necessarily the invention of an everyday greeting.
- “It has always meant hello.” Funerary art and political imagery show why that interpretation is too narrow.
- “Its meaning is universal.” The Smithsonian’s discussion of greeting traditions highlights cultural variety. A familiar greeting in one setting is not automatically the expected choice in another.
These distinctions make the story more interesting, rather than less. A small gesture can be adapted, reinterpreted, and incorporated into different customs without keeping one original meaning.
Frequently asked questions
Who invented the handshake?
No individual is securely identified as its inventor. Ancient representations show hand-clasping, while the everyday greeting developed through a longer and more complicated social history.
Did ancient Greeks shake hands?
Greek art depicts people clasping hands. However, some of the clearest surviving examples are funerary scenes, so they should not all be interpreted as ordinary greetings.
Did Quakers create the custom?
They did not invent hand-clasping. Their historical significance lies in adopting handshaking within an approach to greeting that challenged forms of social deference.
Was shaking hands definitely a way to check for weapons?
That is a popular origin theory, not an established explanation of how the custom began. A gesture’s possible usefulness does not prove its historical origin.
Does an ancient picture show exactly how people moved their hands?
No. A still image preserves a position, not the complete motion. It can show a handclasp without establishing its duration, movement, or every detail of the interaction.
