HANDSHAKE | How COVID Killed a Grand Gesture

Tomb of the Verboten Handshake.
Epitaph by JT Marlin.

April 18, 2020–Before the arrival of Covid-19, the handshake was associated from the first extant written words with the idea of mutuality and peaceful intent. The Egyptian hieroglyphic of the extended hand is associated with giving. Handshaking seems to have been part of religious ritual in Babylon long before 850 BC, when the earliest recorded handshake partners were two kings—Assyria’s Shalmaneser III and Babylonia’s Marduk-Zakir-Shumi I.

Yet a few days ago, Dr Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that when the plague of the coronavirus has passed, we should not only keep washing our hands, we should not go back to hand-shaking.

So the handshake is dangerous, now? What happened to its great reputation as the sign of friendship and gentlemanly mutual commitment? How did the royal handshake get and lose such a good name?

The two kings are displayed in about 850 BC, staff in the left hand and right hands clasped, on a bas-relief in sandstone on Shalmaneser's throne pedestal (see photo of detail at right). About 7 feet high, the relief was found in Nimrud and is in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad.

Royal shake: Assyria's Shalmaneser III
 extends hand of friendship in c 850 BC
to Babylon's Marduk-Zakir-Shumi I.

Babylon was a good friend to Shalmaneser in his two-year war in the area. Shalmaneser later returned the favor to Marduk by defending himself against a rebellious younger brother.

In the United States, Quakers are credited with the spread of the handshake, as a mark of equality. The "gentlemen's agreement" was a hand-shaking ceremony associated with the signing of covenants of all kinds.

The handshake became a vehicle for transporting the Trojan Horses of droplets carrying the microscopic SARS-CoV2. In this way, Covid-19 destroyed the gentlemanly handshake's reputation and has made it verboten, even when neither side has symptoms of the disease, because the virus can be transferred by a carrier without symptoms.

Elbow-bumping or fist-bumping don't really work as a substitute for a handshake, because they both require two people to get close enough to each other for the virus to be transferred by droplets from the carrier. Social distancing requires a minimum distance between people of at least six feet (two meters), some say even more.

Asian bowing from six feet away, a practice made amusing in The Mikado, is looking a lot more sensible. We might now wonder why has it taken us so long to figure out the wisdom of that—along with, when a flu is about, regularly wearing a cloth face covering in public? We should have a public mourning of the end of the handshake... but not until the deadly disease that it has helped to spread has abated!

(Hat tip to RDA.)