When Did the Tradition of Engagement Rings Begin?
Here’s a look at the evolution of this beloved piece of wedding jewelry.
How It All Started
For centuries, engagement rings have been the ultimate declarations of love, whether you’re already engaged, fantasizing about the day when your partner will propose to you or just a fan of that one glittering diamond sitting on your finger.
And while we're at it, the engagement rings that we hold so near and dear today are not what they used to be —in fact, the history of these glittering gemstones is sure to put a sparkle in your eye. What we perceive as a sign of physical marriage today was simply a sign of possession to the Romans and Egyptians back in the 2nd century BC1. Not very romantic, right?
Fortunately, things have changed since, but if you’ve ever wanted to know more about how this wedding extra went from zero to hero then we’ve compiled a quick guide on the history of engagement rings. Here’s your quick primer on how these sparklers got their start, how they’ve developed and what they represent in contemporary times.
Roman Era
Like a lot of modern traditions, engagement rings date back to Ancient Rome, where Roman women wore rings made from ivory, flint, bone, copper or iron “as a sign of business contracts” or “to assert mutual love and obedience” to men (Gemological Institute of America (GIA))2. These Roman trinkets were based on rings worn by Egyptian pharaohs, who wore such symbols to represent the sun, moon— earth's only companions at the time, as they knew it (according to the GIA official website1).
Also according to the GIA, it wasn’t until 850 CE that engagement rings were officially assigned a meaning when it became customary for Pope Nicholas I to publically announce that this particular piece of jewelry represented a man’s agreement to marry2. The Cape Town Diamond Museum also notes that the diamond would not be seen on an engagement ring until 1477 when Archduke Maximilian of Austria proposed to Mary of Burgundy with a stone set in the form of an “M”.3
Cut to the 15th century, when engagement rings took on the symbolism of intertwined unity that we now associate with them. This is was also the time period when gimmel rings, which are made from three interlocking bands, would start to appear on fingers of couples in love sometimes – each band worn separately by the couple and then joined together as one (the third being the wedding band) for their big day to be worn by the new bride in her wedding ring set.
Final Thoughts
They were followed by posy rings, baubles that had inscriptions of love poetry secretly engraved on the inside of the band and became a craze in their own right — couples exchanged both silver, which was often used as a placeholder until gold could be afforded, and gold posy rings at their nuptials.