Men were adorned, in earlier days, fully as much as women. They wore not only finger rings but earrings. At one of the oldest known cities, Ur of the Chaldees, a gold earring has been unearthed from the sarcophagus of a monarch who ruled 4,700 years ago. The burial place of the Pharaoh Tutankhamen, dug up in 1922, contained amber earrings. Ancient Assyrian kings, with their hierarchy of priests and their cohorts of soldiers, are shown on ancient carvings—all with adornments for the ears. When Moses was up in the clouds on Mount Sinai receiving the Ten Commandments on tables of stone, Aaron in the valley, preparing to make gods for the people, said unto them: “Break off the golden earrings, which are in the ears of your wives, of your sons....” As the Roman Republic grew effeminate with wealth and luxury, earrings were more popular among men than women; no less a “he-man” than Julius Caesar himself brought back to repute and fashion the use of rings in the ears of men. In Persia of the thirteenth century, the vogue was so popular that the Sassanian kings had engravings of themselves, wearing their earrings, set as signet stones upon their fingers. Elizabethan England found earrings tossed with the heads of Italianate dandiprats. Shakespeare’s Othello wore them, and to our own day the stage Moor (as well as the cinema pirate) wears a gold loop in at least one ear. But through the next century the English macaronis (fops who are mocked in our “Yankee Doodle” song) continued to flaunt earrings upon the Puritan public. Charles I of England went to his execution in 1649 disdainfully dressed in all his finery, including a ring in his right ear. Perhaps it was the lopping of that royal head that helped to end the fashion for men. Women, however, have continued to wear earrings to enhance their beauty. At times, when other jewels were growing oversized, the earrings also grew enormous. In Sumer, over four thousand years ago, Queen Shubad wore great golden half-moons. Women in ancient Phoenicia vied with one another in the size of their earrings. Old Etruscan ear ornaments bore little boxes for perfume or for charms. In the fourth century B.C. the Greek hetaerae wore cupids on their ears. Queen Victoria, twenty-three centuries later, saw the vogue of gold-rimmed cameos close against the ears, from which hung larger cameos. But whether it be the stalwart Bahri matron in Central Africa who slips through her ear lobe half a hundred separate loops of elephant hair, or the proud Zulu maiden who has stretched her lobes until an ivory tube half an inch in diameter is pushed through, or the dainty city lass with a pearl clipped close upon each ear—the earring is an almost universal jewel, worn as an adjunct to human beauty. _The Significance of the Ears_