ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE MULLET

by Dr. C. Warren Fahy, Mullet Institute of Technology

There are an average of 100,000 follicles of hair on the human head. Men and women have shaved, braided, tapered, dyed, matted, and teased them for thousands of years, and yet the exact phenomenon known as the "Mullet" was not struck upon until quite recently. Indeed, if all of human history were reduced to one episode of "I Love Lucy," the Mullet would not make its cameo until the placard reading "A Desilu Production" appeared on the screen. That said, numerous precursors of the Mullet have dogged our halting march toward civilization since the dawn of time. Occasionally called the "Ape Drape," the Mullet has its roots in prehistory, when humankind was covered with hair. So although Neanderthal Man had no blowdryers, mousses, sprays or permanent hair-kinking techniques, he did have a complete ignorance of personal hygiene. This, coupled with prolonged exposure to the elements, created a definite proto Mullet of sorts. Eventually humankind branched off from its more hirsute cousins in our family tree: the neck lengthened, the frame grew more erect and the cranium expanded. Once the increasingly sophisticated mind inside the head became conscious of the untamed primordial tresses atop the head, the haircut was born. Since Oriental Man eschewed excess hair early on, Mullet epidemics are few and far between in Asian history. Western Civilization, on the other hand, has been much hairier and is therefore where we begin our search for origins of the modern Mullet.

Lesser civilizations and tribes used hairstyles to identify friend or foe. The Hittite warrior in figure 1 dates from 1500 BC, while figure 2 shows a member of the Moabite tribe from Biblical times with skinhead and hippie sensibilities served on the same pate.

An Egyptian official in 700 BC wore the mane-like wig favored by this most ancient, animal worshipping civilization (figure 3). By the time Rome conquered Egypt in 200 AD, Egyptians like the one seen in figure 4 were forced to discard their wigs and wear short hair.

In Greece during the sixth century BC, vestiges of the primordial persisted in hairstyles of the youth (figure 5), but by the end of that century, short hair was in and the Golden Age was born (figure 6).

Greco-Roman civilization looked down on androgynous hairstyles. Men wore their hair short; women wore it long. When the Romans conquered Gaul and Britain, they dispatched barbers to cut the hair of the vanquished barbarians. This created a festering acrimony in the hearts of the conquered Mullet Heads, who eventually grew their hair back, sacked Rome and ushered in the Dark Ages. After the Fall of Rome in 476 AD, the Church created confusion by requiring monks to shave the top of their skulls and weave the shorn locks into beastly hairshirts. Important men like Charlemagne (742-814 AD) said to hell with this noise and grew their hair as long as they liked, as did the dreaded Visigoths, Vikings and other "Mullitia" who held feral sway over this importunate era. Not until the Renaissance were medieval styles replaced by resurrected classical values, but while the newly emerging middle class embraced this revival, the ruling classes again clung to the Mullet. Thus the newfound wealth of nations only produced more elaborate Mullet variants in the elite salons of Europe, and by the seventeenth century, in pre-Revolutionary France, we encounter the first example of an entire culture succumbing to pre-Mullet sensibilities.

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