Where Did Handshakes Come From? A Gesture With a Disputed Past

The clasped right hand appears early and repeatedly in the record as a marker of agreement and equality rather than of disarmament:

• •A ninth-century BCE Assyrian relief shows Shalmaneser the Third clasping hands with a Babylonian king, apparently marking an alliance between rulers of comparable standing
• •Greek funerary reliefs from the fifth century BCE frequently show the dead clasping hands with the living, in a gesture called dexiosis whose meaning is debated and which is clearly significant rather than casual
• •Roman coins and reliefs use clasped hands as an emblem of concord and of agreements between parties, and the Latin term for the gesture is associated with pledged faith
• •Medieval and early modern commercial practice used a handclasp to conclude a bargain, which survives in the phrase about shaking on a deal and in the legal recognition in some traditions that a handclasp completed a contract
• •Quakers in seventeenth-century England adopted the handshake deliberately as an egalitarian alternative to bowing and hat-doffing, which were gestures of rank, and are credited with spreading it widely as a general greeting
• •Its use as an ordinary everyday greeting between social equals is comparatively recent, spreading through the nineteenth century alongside changing ideas about social hierarchy

The objections are practical rather than merely pedantic. Shaking the right hand does nothing about a weapon in the left, a knife in a belt, or an armed companion, so as a security measure it is theatre rather than a check. The gesture appears in contexts where weapons are not plausibly at issue, including funerary art and commercial agreements. No ancient source states the disarmament rationale, which is what would be expected if it were the understood meaning. And the explanation has the shape of a folk etymology, being tidy, memorable and constructed backwards from the modern gesture, which is the same pattern as the many invented origins attached to other everyday customs. The more defensible reading is that the right hand is the weapon hand in most people, that offering it and having it held is a display of trust and commitment, and that this reads as sincerity without requiring any specific historical moment of disarming.

The handshake carries a surprising amount of information for a two-second contact. Research has found that grip strength, duration, eye contact, dryness and completeness of grip all influence judgements of a person's competence and trustworthiness, that these judgements form within moments and are hard to revise, and that a firm handshake correlates with more favourable evaluation in interview settings, with effects reported for both men and women though not identically. Brain imaging work has found that a handshake preceding an interaction increases activity in regions associated with reward and reduces attention to negative aspects of the encounter. It also functions as a ritual boundary, marking the beginning and end of a formal interaction and signalling a transition from negotiation to agreement, which is why the photograph of two leaders shaking hands is the standard image of a treaty regardless of whether anything has been settled.

The handshake is far from universal, and greeting customs vary enough that international etiquette guidance is an industry. The Japanese bow, the Indian namaste with palms together, the Thai wai, greetings with a hand over the heart, cheek kisses in varying numbers and configurations across Europe and Latin America, and various forearm or shoulder clasps all do comparable work with different contact rules. Several of these avoid physical contact entirely, and some traditions restrict contact between men and women, which makes the assumption that a handshake is neutral a specifically Western one. The pandemic interrupted the practice globally and prompted widespread predictions of its permanent end, with medical figures pointing out that hands transmit pathogens efficiently and that a contactless greeting would reduce transmission. Contactless alternatives were adopted temporarily and the handshake returned quickly in most places, which suggests the ritual function outweighs the hygiene argument for most people.

The claim that handshakes began as a check for weapons has no supporting evidence and does not survive practical examination, since it addresses only one hand. The documented history shows clasped right hands marking agreement and equality from an Assyrian relief of the ninth century BCE through Greek funerary art, Roman concord imagery and medieval bargaining, with Quakers adopting it as an egalitarian alternative to bowing. Its use as an everyday greeting is a nineteenth-century development.