I was thinking about how men are portrayed in ancient period movies as having long hair and beards. I wondered if men were ever clean shaven or always had a beard going. Did they use their iron knives to roughly chop their hair off? Did they ever have short hair cuts like we do now?
I guess that would depend on the location in the world and what you mean by ancient. Scissors have been around for almost four thousand years in Egypt and the Middle East. They were not the pivot scissors you think of, rather two blades connected by a flexible strip of metal (think a safety pin without the loop of metal to add resistance when closing it). Pivot scissors that you may be more familiar with first made their appearance in the first centuries AD.
This tends towards an anthropology question. A razor is a sharp metal blade. Humans have been making sharp metal blades nearly as long as they've been making metal. But we've been hunting with edges as long as we've existed, and tools used by Homo species have been around 2.6 million years, IIRC. Before there was metal, there were stone edges. And here, for your viewing pleasure, is a flintknapper, shaving. As you can see, he's got a decent shave there with a stone tool. He's got a very nice stone tool, a relatively uncommon material, and more than two million years of technological advancement, but it's really amazing was prehistoric humans and pre-human Homo species were able to do with stone. It's plausible that shaving could even predate us.
hi! you'll find lots of additional information in the FAQ*, under Haircare, On the history of facial hair and the shaving thereof, and When did women start to shave their legs/armpits?
*see the link on the sidebar or the wiki tab