Ever wondered how these strange medieval bowl haircuts came into fashion? I believe I can offer an answer. Quite a surprising one I'd say.
Let’s first have a look at what’s the official explanation
(the one I found at least). According to the French medievalist Michaud-Fréjaville,
the fashion for this cut could be explained "by the shape of the bascinet(helmet)
and the way of attaching the camail.”
Even though it does sound rational, it simply doesn’t strike
a chord with me. For two main reasons:
- many people had their upper hair quite thin, but still used
to cut it that way (which would make you lose the shock-absorber effect if that was
the initial idea)
- bottom part of the head is clearly shaved (without evident
necessity for it), which doesn’t seem to have any other purpose other than aesthetical)
And that’s the key point. I don’t think the haircut was of functional nature, but rather social one and that they were trying to express
something specific with that hairstyle.
Let’s do a quick time (and distance travel) and have a look
at an interesting artifact I stumbled upon a few days ago, which fired a spark inside
my head:
What you see before you are the coins minted by a great
Illyrian emperor Balaj (allegedly)(Ballaios
– which is what you can read on the right side of the coins from the picture)
and are traced to belong to the era of around 2 century BC. That makes it about
15-17 centuries away in the past and many more miles of distance! Supercool if
you ask me and we aren’t event half way through. Here is the map of places
where the money’s been found:
So, in case you haven’t done it already, I’d will ask you to
take a moment and compare the portraits from the first picture to the man’s
head on the bottom left side of the Illyrian coin. Now that you’ve done it, take
what you have in your mind and compare it with the picture bellow (especially
previous one):
An Arcadian coin
representing an acorn
Hehehe:) I hope you can see what shape is trying to be
achieved by the hairstyle.
Now, to support this claim with a bit of a proof, let’s dig a bit deeper into the analysis of the “emperor” Ballaios’s coins. Having all things considered, I believe there was no such person as this emperor, for two main reasons:
- There is no specific mention of him in the history chronicles, even though the amount of coins found in the area is huge and he couldn’t have passed unnoticed (one could also propose a theory that Rome contemporaries never mention him in order to make him disappear from the history timeline, but I don’t think that’s really the case, mostly due to the second argument)
- If we have a look at the etymology of the word Ballaios, we’ll find it consist of the root “bal/bel” (which means acorn or oak) and a suffix “ios” (which is suffix added to nouns or adjectives, forming adjectives: pertaining to, belonging to ("of"). It could either mean that Ballaios is a signature by the ones who minted the money and marked it as theirs or what I see as more likely: that it was simply their name (belonging to/off-springs/children of Oak/Bal/Bel/Zeus/Jove)
So, what I’m proposing here actually is that there was no emperor
Ballaios, but
only people who called themselves by the name of oak/acorn who lived there in
Illyria Proper (Uža
Ilirija), which would mean that the people of Illyria where Pelasgos(of
sorts) and these coins were more like their national currency.
In that case, does it make sense that they, as children of
that God (as they saw themselves) which was represented by the Oak tree tried
to symbolically represent themselves as acorns(by haircut) and thus pay homage
to their origins?
I would say so... what do you think?
And if all this is true, isn't this tiny clue actually a
huge (and one more) link which connects peoples of Illyria and those from
France/British Isles?