The Origins of the Handshake: A 2,800-Year-Old Weapons Check That Never Stopped

There is a stone relief showing two kings clasping hands, dated to the 9th century BCE: the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III gripping the hand of the Babylonian king Marduk-zakir-shumi I, sealing an alliance between their kingdoms. That is the earliest known depiction of a handshake, and it is already doing exactly what a handshake does today, sealing an agreement between two people who needed physical proof the deal was real. Nearly 3,000 years later, you still shake hands to close a business deal or meet someone new. The gesture has barely changed. But the reasons behind it have shifted a few times.

Proving You Weren’t Holding a Weapon

The most consistent explanation across history is also the most practical one. An open, extended hand shows you are not gripping a dagger or a club. In a world where most adult men carried weapons as a matter of course, that mattered.

Ancient Greece formalized this into a recognized gesture called dexiosis, documented as far back as the 5th century BCE. It shows up constantly in Greek art: on funerary steles where the deceased shakes hands with a loved one in farewell, on painted vases, even on a carving of Hera and Athena shaking hands with each other. Homer references handshaking repeatedly in the Iliad and the Odyssey as a gesture of trust and pledged commitment. This was not casual body language. It carried real symbolic weight.

When Rome Made It About the Forearm

The Romans took the Greek gesture and made it more literal. Instead of a simple hand clasp, the Roman handshake often involved gripping each other’s forearms rather than just the hand. The practical advantage is obvious. A dagger could be hidden up a sleeve where a simple hand clasp would never reveal it. Grabbing the forearm made that much harder to pull off. The gesture shows up frequently in Roman military and diplomatic contexts, where alliances were formalized with a firm grip on the arm rather than the hand alone.

Why Medieval Knights Might Have Started the Shaking

The actual up-and-down shaking motion may have entered the picture later, in medieval Europe. Some historians propose knights added it specifically as a practical test: if a hidden blade was tucked into a sleeve or gauntlet, vigorously shaking the arm had a decent chance of dislodging it.

Whether this is precisely how the shaking motion originated is hard to confirm, since the written record on this detail is thin. But the logic tracks cleanly with everything before it. Every version of this gesture, across a thousand years and multiple civilizations, kept circling back to the same purpose: prove, physically, that you meant no harm.

The Quakers and the Idea of Equality

The handshake’s modern meaning shifted in the 17th century, thanks to the Quakers, members of the Religious Society of Friends. Quaker theology held that all people were equal before God, regardless of rank, which put them at odds with the era’s elaborate social customs: bowing, hat-tipping, and other gestures of deference that varied depending on who outranked whom.

The Quakers rejected all of it in favor of one gesture, extended identically to everyone. A Quaker offered the same handshake to a nobleman that they offered a laborer. This was genuinely radical in a society built on visible hierarchy, and it is largely credited with pushing the handshake toward becoming the standard, egalitarian greeting it is today.

By the Victorian era, etiquette manuals had codified it further, instructing that a proper handshake be firm. That preference still holds across much of the English-speaking world today, though it is not universal. In several Asian cultures, an overly firm grip reads as aggressive, and in Japan, bowing remains the dominant greeting, with handshakes largely reserved for international business.

What Nearly Replaced It

The handshake’s dominance has wavered occasionally, mostly for hygiene reasons. The fist bump, tracing back to boxing gloves touching before a match and later basketball culture in the 1970s, gained traction during flu seasons and pandemic periods as a lower-contact alternative. A meaningful share of Americans switched to fist bumps specifically to avoid germ transmission during those periods, though the handshake has generally reasserted itself in professional and diplomatic settings once health concerns faded.