Free Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things by Charles Panati Page A

weapon hands—were extended as a token of goodwill. This is also offered as the reason why women, who throughout history were never the bearers of weapons, never developed the custom of the handshake.
    Other customs of greeting have ancient origins:
    The gentlemanly practice of tipping one’s hat goes back in principle to ancient Assyrian times, when captives were required to strip naked to demonstrate subjugation to their conquerors. The Greeks required new servants to strip from the waist up.
    Removing an article of clothing became a standard act of respect. Romans approached a holy shrine only after taking their sandals off. And a person of low rank removed his shoes before entering a superior’s home—a custom the Japanese have brought, somewhat modified, into modern times. In England, women took off their gloves when presented to royalty. In fact,two other gestures, one male, one female, are remnants of acts of subjugation or respect: the bow and the curtsy; the latter was at one time a full genuflection.
    By the Middle Ages in Europe, the symbol of serfdom to a feudal lord was restricted to baring the head. The implicit message was the same as in earlier days: “I am your obedient servant.” So persuasive was the gesture that the Christian Church adopted it, requiring that men remove their hats on entering a church.
    Eventually, it became standard etiquette for a man to show respect for an equal by merely tipping his hat.

Chapter 3
    On the Calendar
    New Year’s Day: 2000 B.C ., Babylonia
    Our word “holiday” comes from the Middle English halidai , meaning “holy day,” for until recently, humankind’s celebrations were of a religious nature.
    New Year’s Day is the oldest and most universal of all such “holy day” festivals. Its story begins, oddly enough, at a time when there was as yet no such thing as a calendar year. The time between the sowing of seeds and the harvesting of crops represented a “year,” or cycle.
    The earliest recorded New Year’s festival was staged in the city of Babylon, the capital of Babylonia, whose ruins stand near the modern town of al-Hillah, Iraq. The new year was celebrated late in March, at the vernal equinox, when spring begins, and the occasion lasted eleven days. Modern festivities pale by comparison. Initiating events, a high priest, rising two hours before dawn, washed in the sacred water of the Euphrates, then offered a hymn to the region’s chief god of agriculture, Marduk, praying for a bountiful new cycle of crops. The rump of a beheaded ram was rubbed against the temple walls to absorb any contagion that might infest the sacred edifice and, by implication, the next year’s harvest. The ceremony was called kuppuru —a word that appeared among the Hebrews at about the same time, in their Day of Atonement festival, Yom Kippur.
    Food, wine, and hard liquor were copiously consumed—for the enjoyment they provided, but more important, as a gesture of appreciation to Marduk for the previous year’s harvest. A masked mummers’ play was enacted on the sixth day, a tribute to the goddess of fertility. It was followedby a sumptuous parade—highlighted by music, dancing, and costumes—starting at the temple and terminating on the outskirts of Babylon at a special building known as the New Year House, whose archaeological remains have been excavated.

    A high priest presiding over a New Year’s celebration, once a religious observance staged in spring to mark the start of a new agricultural season. Julius Caesar moved the holiday to the dead of winter .
    How New Year’s Day, essentially a seed-sowing occasion, shifted from the start of spring to the dead of winter is a strange, convoluted tale spanning two millennia.
    From both an astronomical and an agricultural standpoint, January is a perverse time for symbolically beginning a crop cycle, or new year. The sun stands at no fiduciary place in the sky—as it does for the spring and autumn equinoxes and the