The History of Wedding Rings!

00:00 Introduction: Are wedding rings and ancient tradition or a modern marketing gimmick. You might be surprised! 00:32 The tradition of exchanging rings dates back 3,000 years ago. Egyptian pharaohs were the first to use rings to represent eternity due to the circle not having a beginning or ending. The shape also reflects the sun and moon which the Egyptians worshipped. The space in the middle of the ring represented a gateway to the unknown. The Egyptian ouroboros rings portrayed a serpent swallowing its tail, representing the eternal cycle of things. The ouroboros is one of the oldest symbols in the world, and its name means “tail devourer” in Greek. 01:04 When Alexander the Great conquered the Egyptians, the Greeks adopted the tradition of giving rings to their lovers to represent devotion. Many of these rings depicted Eros or Cupid, the god of love. When the Romans conquered Greece, they picked up on this tradition as well and began using iron and copper rings in marriage ceremonies. The iron rings sometimes had key motifs to symbolize that the wife now had control of the household goods. By the 2nd century however, most rings were gold. 01:29 Gold rings became more fancy over the centuries because they showed off how rich the giver was. There was never any real symbolism with the material the ring was made of. These guys just wanted to make sure you knew they were loaded. Those Egyptians were really good at choosing symbolic reasons to wear the rings. The decided that the ring finger contained a “vena amoris” or “vein of love” that led directly to the heart. The Romans were all down with that belief as well which just goes to show neither new anything about anatomy because that’s not true. But we still are rocking that tradition. 02:00 After a few hundred years Medieval Europeans started putting rubies in their rings to symbolize passion, sapphires for the heavens and diamonds for steadfast strength. Around the 1600s couples started wearing bands during the engagement period. During the wedding ceremony, the groom placed his band on the bride’s finger, uniting the wedding bands in a matched set. Also in the 1600’s we started to see poetry inscribed inside and outside of the wedding band. Not everybody was on board with the tradition of using jewelry to symbolize their marriage. The Puritans in colonial America thought jewelry was a waste of money. So Puritan husbands gave their wives thimbles instead of rings. After brides used their thimbles to sew clothes and textiles for their new home, they could then saw off the tops of their thimbles to create rings. 02:47 The first recorded diamond wedding ring dates back to the late 1300s or early 1400s when it was left by an English widow in her will. The first famous diamond engagement ring was given in 1477 by Archduke Maximillian of Austria to Mary of Burgundy. The ring is said to have been made up of small flat diamonds that spelled out Mary’s initial, M, a fitting gift for the future duchess. 03:17 Are wedding rings just a symbol of a couples love and wealth or did it serve another purpose too. In Medieval England, confusion about the legitimacy of weddings were common. Since witnesses and clergymen weren’t required to be present at the wedding, one or both of the couple could later deny that a wedding had taken place. In the 12th century, the Christian church declared marriage to be a holy sacrament and established a church ceremony. Rings were a part of the ceremony, and it became the rule that no man should place any type of ring on a woman's hand unless he meant to get married. Before this, rings did not always signify marriage. They were often given as tokens of devotion or to represent betrothal. This is when two types of rings emerged: The engagement ring and wedding ring. 03:58 It was not until World War II that men started to regularly wear wedding rings. The tradition only caught on when American and European soldiers wore wedding rings as a way to remember their wives and sweethearts back home. The tradition continued through the Korean War and after this, wedding rings for men caught on among civilians. 04:12 Until the 1940s, diamonds were just one of many gems used as engagement ring stones. The wild popularity is mainly due to De Beers, the diamond company that controlled the majority of the world’s diamonds at the time. When people stopped buying diamonds during the economic downturn of 1930s, De Beers launched an epic marketing campaign. They showered diamonds on Hollywood actresses like Marilyn Monroe to make diamonds glamorous symbols of romance. De Beers also came up with the still popular slogan “Diamonds are forever” Check us out on IG:   / manlybands   Come say hi on FB:   / getmanlybands   Read our 5* reviews: https://manlybands.com/pages/testimon...