Living beforenail clippers

Egypt: the overseers of the manicurists of the Great House

Under King Niuserre, in Egypt’s Fifth Dynasty, two men, Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep, both held the title “overseer of the manicurists of the Great House”. Their tomb at Saqqara is one of the largest and most richly decorated there, and one of its scenes shows barbers, manicurists and pedicurists at work (after Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, whose page gives Niuserre’s reign as c. 2445 to 2421 BC). The tomb’s publication, by A. M. Moussa and H. Altenmüller (Mainz, 1977), was not read.

China: clippings as part of the body

The Yili, the Book of Etiquette and Ceremonial, sets out the funeral of an officer. After the body is washed:

The pit was dug between the steps earlier in the same rite. The Liji, the Book of Rites, gives the job to a junior attendant and sorts the dead by rank:

Two stories put cut nails into a prayer. Sima Qian’s Shiji tells this of the Duke of Zhou, whose own name was Dan:

The character the Shiji uses for the nails, 蚤, stands for 爪, nail: the Qing encyclopedia Gujin tushu jicheng quotes the same line with 爪. The same encyclopedia quotes the Diwang shiji on King Tang:

In the Huainanzi, a general who has just been handed the axes by his ruler gets ready:

Trimmed nails and clean garments are two of the things the Yili does for a corpse. The comparison is ours; neither text draws it.

And the Han Feizi has a ruler who uses a clipping to test his court. The story illustrates the sixth of seven techniques, asking about what you already know:

He had the clipping in his fist, so anyone who handed him one was handing him their own.

Long nails are in the record too, as one person’s mark. The same encyclopedia quotes the Chen shu on an empress:

The guards that protect such nails are late. David R. Daly of the National Park Service writes: “Fingernail guards were worn by high ranking Chinese women during the latter half of the 19th century”.

India: the Buddha allows a nail-cutter

The Vinaya, the monks’ rule, in the translation of T. W. Rhys Davids and Hermann Oldenberg (1885), begins with a ban: “You are not, O Bhikkhus, to wear long nails.” What follows is a rule being worked out. “Now at that time the Bhikkhus tore off their nails with the nails, bit them off with their teeth, or rubbed them down against the wall; and their fingers were hurt.” Then: “‘I allow you, O Bhikkhus, nail-cutters.’ They cut their nails down to the blood, and their fingers were hurt. ‘I allow you, O Bhikkhus, to cut your nails according to the length of the flesh.’” The Pali for nail-cutters is nakhacchedana. Polish is out: “You are not, O Bhikkhus, to have the twenty nails polished. I allow you, O Bhikkhus, to remove the dirt only.”

The Laws of Manu, in Georg Bühler’s translation (1886), tell the graduate to live “Keeping his hair, nails, and beard clipped” (4.35), and later in the same chapter say “Let him not clip his nails or hair, and not tear his nails with his teeth” (4.69), without saying how the two fit. A man who “bites his nails, goes soon to perdition” (4.71).

François Bernier’s letter to Chapelain, dated Shiraz, 4 October 1667, describes ascetics with an arm “perpetually lifted up above the head; the nails of their hands being twisted, and longer than half my little finger, with which I measured them” (tr. Irving Brock, revised by Archibald Constable, 1891, p. 316). The pages around the line are hostile, and we quote the measurement only.

Zoroastrian Iran: bury them, or arm the demons

The Vendidad, in James Darmesteter’s translation (1898), gives the rite: “For the nails, thou shalt dig a hole, out of the house, as deep as the top joint of the little finger”. Then: “thou shalt draw three furrows with a knife of metal around the hole, or six furrows or nine”. The nails are offered to a bird, the Asho-zushta: “these nails I announce and consecrate unto thee. May they be for thee so many spears and knives, so many bows and falcon-winged arrows and so many sling-stones against the Mazainya Daevas”. Unconsecrated, they arm the other side: “If those nails have not been consecrated (to the bird), they shall be in the hands of the Mazainya Daevas so many spears and knives so many bows and falcon-winged arrows, and so many sling-stones”.

Darmesteter’s notes name the bird: “‘The owl,’ according to modern tradition.” He quotes the Bundahishn: “when the nails have had a spell uttered over them, the bird takes and eats them up, that the fiends may not do any harm by their means”. And he adds how it is done: “The nails are cut in two and the fragments are put in the hole with the point directed towards the north, that is to say, against the breasts of the Devs”.

The Sad Dar, in E. W. West’s translation (1885), gives its own steps. The parings go “into a paper”; a man who does not know the Baj is “to furrow three lines, with the nail-cutter, around the nail-parings”; and “he should carry a hole down through four finger-breadths of earth, and, having placed the nail-parings in that spot, he puts the soil overhead.” Of the bird: “They also call it the owl, and it eats nails.” The parings must be broken, “for they would come into use as weapons (sila’h) of wizards”, and “if they fall in the midst of food, there is danger of pulmonary consumption.” West says only that the Sad Dar “had the reputation of being a very old work in the early part of the sixteenth century”. We print no date for the Vendidad.

Babylonia: righteous, pious, wicked

The Babylonian Talmud, in tractate Moed Katan, gives a ruling of Rav’s against scissors, said of a mourner, and then what Rav Shemen bar Abba saw:

Between the three lessons and the last line comes an objection:

The line about the study hall is the answer to it. The passage on mourners’ nails opens with two brothers:

It is Shmuel who flings his own nails, and he says why: his brother’s earlier remark about a loss of Shmuel’s own had come true.

Tractate Niddah puts thrown nails on a list:

The three limits are set and then rejected: none of them stands.

One verse of Deuteronomy says only that a woman shall “do her nails”. The rabbis split on what that means:

Rashi follows Rabbi Akiva:

The Islamic world: never more than forty nights

Sahih al-Bukhari gives these words of the Prophet Muhammad:

Fitra is the natural or original way of things. Sahih Muslim adds an interval:

The hadith does not name who set the limit.

Greece and Rome: an iron rule, a miser and slaves who sang

Hesiod puts it as a riddle: “μηδ᾽ ἀπὸ πεντόζοιο θεῶν ἐν δαιτὶ θαλείῃ / αὖον ἀπὸ χλωροῦ τάμνειν αἴθωνι σιδήρῳ”, “At a cheerful festival of the gods do not cut the withered from the quick upon that which has five branches with bright steel.” (Works and Days 742 to 743, tr. Hugh G. Evelyn-White, 1914). His note solves it: “I.e. ‘do not cut your finger-nails.’” The Greek word is iron; “bright steel” is Evelyn-White’s.

Plautus’s Aulularia has a joke about the miser Euclio: “quin ipsi pridem tonsor unguis dempserat: / collegit, omnia abstulit praesegmina”, “the barber had cut his nails; he collected all the parings, and carried them off” (lines 312 to 313, tr. Henry Thomas Riley, 1852).

Horace describes a man, Volteius Mena, a crier:

He is alone in the booth, cleaning his own nails. No barber is at work in the lines.

The dinner Petronius invents for Trimalchio is satire, not a record of what Roman hosts did:

Later in the same novel a sailor named Hesus states a belief of the sea, after the heroes have had their heads shaved on board at night:

Pliny the Elder records a scruple about market days:

Whether this touched money rests on a disputed word. The manuscripts have pecuniae, of money; Mayhoff’s edition, which we follow, prints his own conjecture, persuasione, by the belief. John Bostock and H. T. Riley (1855 to 1857) translated the manuscripts’ word: “It is religiously believed by many, that it is ominous in a pecuniary point of view, for a person to pare his nails without speaking, on the market days at Rome, or to begin at the forefinger”. The Latin does not say whether the custom was lucky, unlucky or required.

Japan: a god’s punishment, and the seven-herb nail cut

In the Kojiki, in Basil Hall Chamberlain’s translation (1882), a god’s punishment begins with a fine of “a thousand tables” and goes on: “and likewise cut his beard, and even caused the nails of his fingers and toes to be pulled out, and expelled him”. The nails are part of the punishment, listed beside the fine.

The seven-herb nail cut belongs to the seventh day of the New Year. A Japanese dictionary explains nanakusa-zume, seven-herb nails: at the seven-herb festival on the seventh day of the first month, people dipped their fingers in water in which the seven herbs had been boiled, and then cut their nails, to drive off evil. Its earliest example is a senryū of 1794 (after the Seisenban Nihon Kokugo Daijiten). The dictionary also quotes Kurokawa Dōyū’s Hinami kiji, known in a manuscript of 1676 and a printed edition with a preface of 1685:

One character of that line is printed in the dictionary only as a small image, which we read as 燖, to scald.

Totoya Hokkei’s print at the head of this page is titled Tsumetoriyoshi, in the Rijksmuseum’s Dutch “Het is goed om je nagels te knippen”, “It is good to cut your nails.” The museum describes it:

The record never names the seven herbs, so the print is probably the seven-herb cut, and no more than probably. We did not read the two poems.

The north: a ship of dead men’s nails

Snorri Sturluson’s Younger Edda, in Rasmus B. Anderson’s translation (1879): “The ship that is called Naglfar also becomes loose. It is made of the nails of dead men; wherefore it is worth warning that, when a man dies with unpared nails, he supplies a large amount of materials for the building of this ship, which both gods and men wish may be finished as late as possible.”

26 July 1881: the lever

US Patent 244,891, “Finger-Nail Trimmer”, was filed on 9 June 1881 and is dated 26 July 1881. The patentees are Eugene Heim and Celestin Matz, of Cincinnati. It describes “a pair of nipping-jaws composed of a single plate of spring-steel”, closed by “a cam-headed lever”. The lever is “roughened on its rear surface to serve as a rasp” and ends in “a hook which serves as a glove-buttoning device”, and “a bow or bail” hangs the tool from “a belt or watch-chain”.

The patent does not claim the trimmer broadly: “We are aware that finger-nail trimmers have been devised with two hinged jaws held normally gaping by a spring [...] and we therefore disclaim invention, broadly”. The words we leave out say the older jaws had “separately-attached nipping-edges” and were “compressed by the direct pressure of the operator’s thumb and finger”. The one-piece jaws and the lever are the new parts. Claim 1 covers jaws “formed of a single integral piece of steel [...] held normally gaping by their resilience, and [...] closed by a cam-headed lever”.

We read three patents from before it. Valentine Fogerty of Boston, 23 March 1875 (US 161,112): a device that trims nails “to the segment of a circle” by filing, with, in its sixth figure, “a cutter having a knife at one end and a file at the other”, and a link to wear it “on a watch-chain as an ornament”. William C. Edge of Newark, New Jersey, 17 October 1876 (US 183,256), “Improvement in Finger-Nail Trimmers”: two concave cutters, with “a suitable spring [...] interposed [...] to hold the two cutters separated, and yet allow them to be brought together”. John H. Hollman of New York, 18 June 1878 (US 205,088): a pointed blade whose slot is “beveled and sharpened to form cutting-edges”, slid into a shell to carry “in the pocket”, with a “segmental concaved file”.

What later clippers kept from 1881 is jaws closed by a cam lever, and not the single plate. A patent issued on 21 November 1922 to Chapel S. Carter and Hedley P. Carter of Ansonia, assignors to the H. C. Cook Company (US 1,436,010), has “two jaw-members” joined by “a rivet uniting the rear ends”, worked by an “operating-lever” with “lifting-cams”. Nicholson Baker, writing in The New Yorker in 1994 about William E. Bassett’s Trim clipper, put it in one line: “The jawed design had been around since the nineteenth century”. The patents of 1876 and 1881 bear him out.

The stories that don’t hold up

“Deuteronomy 21:12 is the oldest record of nail trimming.”

The verse says only “do her nails”, and the rabbis quoted above split on whether that means cut them or let them grow. Wikipedia’s article on nail clippers dates this to the 8th century BC. Egypt’s overseers of the manicurists served under Niuserre, whose reign the Ministry’s page puts at c. 2445 to 2421 BC.

“Horace shows a Roman barber paring his customers’ nails.”

His lines have a crier alone in an empty booth, cleaning his own nails with a little knife. The reading goes back at least to Riley’s footnote to Plautus, which says that in Horace “idlers pared their nails in the shops”. Plautus himself does have a barber cutting a customer’s nails.

“Valentine Fogerty patented the first nail clipper in 1875.”

His patent is a filing device with a knife option, and it is dated 23 March 1875. The 24 February that Wikipedia gives is the day he filed.

“Heim and Matz invented the nail clipper.”

Their patent says trimmers with sprung jaws already existed and disclaims “invention, broadly”, and Edge’s spring trimmer is five years older. What they patented is one-piece jaws closed by a cam-headed lever.

“The Trim clipper dates from 1947.”

Baker, the source cited for it, writes “After the war” and gives no year.

“Romans and Hallstatt people used nail clippers.”

Two photographs on Wikimedia Commons make the claim, and both are their uploaders’ own snapshots of museum objects: one of an object “of unknown provenance” in a Narbonne museum, the other of grave finds from the Magdalenenberg. A Roman nail tool archaeologists have studied in Britain is the nail-cleaner (N. Crummy and H. Eckardt, Archaeological Journal 160, 2003).

“Long nails were the norm in ancient China.”

The Chen shu’s five-cun nails mark one empress, and the guards are late: worn in the latter half of the 19th century, by Daly’s account, and the one shown above is of the early 1900s. The rites above trim the nails of the dead “as on ordinary days”.

“People pared their nails with wooden daggers.”

The line is Shakespeare’s, in Henry V: “this roaring devil i’ the old play, that every one may pare his nails with a wooden dagger”. The Boy is mocking Pistol as the stage devil of the old plays. It is a joke about the theatre.

“Old Croghan Man shows that Iron Age people had nail tools.”

Isabella Mulhall of the National Museum of Ireland said of him in 2006: “He had very well manicured nails”. That means well-kept nails. The article names no tool.

“Hokkei’s print shows the seven-herb nail cut.”

The Rijksmuseum’s record describes a bowl of herbs and never names the seven. Probably is as far as the record goes.