Braids, braids, everywhere! Y’all loved our blog post about Viking hair braids, and we would love to dive deeper into the rich history of hair braiding!

As we mentioned in our last post, there are depictions of braided hair from as early as 30,000 BC/BCE including the famous Venus of Willendorf which was discovered at a paleolithic site in Austria. There are additional Stone Age depictions of what might be braids including the Venus of Brassempouy found in France and dated to around 25,000 BC/BCE. There is significant debate around whether these are braids similar to cornrows or a type of complicated hair covering.

This debate is made more complicated by some people using this small ivory figure as a reason for modern Europeans to style their hair in traditional African and Black hairstyles like cornrows or box braids. The topic of braids brings up complicated topics like cultural appropriation, heritage, and much more! Let’s look more closely at the history of cornrows in particular.

Scholars debate whether the Venus of Brassempouy depicts ornate braids or a hair covering.

Cornrows are a hairstyle in which the hair is divided into cornrow sections arranged in rows generally flat against the scalp. Also known as canerows, the names are likely tied to cultivation of corn and sugarcane during the colonial periods of the Americas. The hairstyle was used by enslaved African people as a utilitarian way of keeping hair out of the face while working. But of course, the history of the braids extends farther back to the continent of Africa. As outlined in Don’t Touch My Hair by author Emma Dabiri, cornrows had different names in African including kolese which means "a creature without legs", like a snail in Yoruba.

Portrait of Tewodros II, Emperor of Ethiopia c.1850 wearing cornrows or shuruba

As Dabiri points out in her book, not only were hair traditions disrupted by the transatlantic slave trade, but colonial forces in West Africa worked to discourage traditional hairstyles and hair cultures. As a result, West African cultures as well as members of the Black diaspora are searching for evidence of historic hairstyles in imagery from African cultures that were once thought lost.

While there are many depictions of Ancient Egyptian braids, most of those would have been wigs rather than protective hairstyles. The ancient Nok culture, however, is a rich source of braid imagery. An Iron Age culture, the Nok are thought to have lived in what is now Nigeria and Benin from roughly 1500 BC/BCE to 1 BC/BCE. They are notable for being the earliest detailed depictions of figural art on the African continent outside of Egypt. People are using the numerous terracotta figures that the Nok left behind to trace the origins of braiding in Nigeria specifically. They are also looking to the Kingdom of Benin and their famous bronzes for other clues. Looking even farther back, some scholars point to figures with cornrows depicted in Tassili n'Ajjer cave paintings in North Africa that date from 6000 BC/BCE.

Nok terracotta sculpture with detailed braids in the Louvre, Paris, France

A Nuba woman wearing cornrows in a traditional styling, Sudan

Braids including cornrows are an important part of Black and African identities. (We didn’t even have time to discuss the history of Black hair in the twentieth century!) We are excited to see what additional research is to come in this area!