Ötzi the Iceman already had pierced ears 5,300 years ago
The oldest mummified human yet found, frozen in an Italian glacier, wore an ear piercing up to 11 millimetres wide. Piercing is ancient and nearly universal, but much of its popular history is invented: a 1960s promoter dreamed up tales about Roman centurions that later books repeated as fact.
Ear and nose piercings turn up across the globe in written records and graves. Nose piercing is documented back to 1500 BCE, nipple piercing at least to Ancient Rome, and lip and tongue piercings historically in some African cultures. The oldest surviving earrings came from the Royal Cemetery of Ur in Sumer, around 2550 BCE, and earrings for pierced ears were buried in the Ukok region between Russia and China between 400 and 300 BCE.
Earrings carried status and meaning. Among the Tlingit of the Pacific Northwest, each earring placed on a child had to be paid for at a costly potlatch, so they signalled nobility and wealth. In Egypt's Eighteenth dynasty, from 1550 to 1292 BCE, gold hoops were common, while gem-set earrings shaped like asps appear to have been kept for nobles. Greeks favoured paste pendants of sacred birds or demigods, and Roman women wore precious stones. The Bible mentions earrings repeatedly: Aaron melts them down for the golden calf, and Deuteronomy prescribes piercing the ear of a slave who chooses to stay.
Reconstructing the past is hard. Early writers rarely explained what piercings meant, and jewellery in graves outlasts the flesh it decorated, leaving its use unclear. The picture was muddied further by Doug Malloy, an enthusiast who in the 1960s and 1970s gave modern piercing a fake historical pedigree in a pamphlet. His story that centurions fastened their capes to nipple rings is one of several myths later reprinted as history.
In the West the practice has risen and fallen. It grew after World War II, spread to sites beyond the ear within 1970s subcultures and went mainstream in the 1990s. People pierce for faith, beauty, self-expression, conformity or rebellion, while schools, employers and religious bodies sometimes restrict it. Modern practice stresses safe materials, sterile technique and aftercare because infection, allergy and scarring are real risks; healing can take from about a month to two full years for a navel.
Source: Body piercing
