A Short History of Talismans
Five thousand years of protective and lucky objects, told through the moments when they first appear in the surviving record.
People have carried small objects for protection and good fortune for as long as we can trace. What survives is a trail of carvings, burials, manuscripts and prints, and following it in order shows how ideas travelled, changed and lasted.
Some caution is needed along the way. An object found in a grave does not tell us exactly what its owner believed, and the dates below mark when a symbol enters the surviving record, not when people first imagined it.
Before writing
Pierced shells from Blombos Cave in South Africa, around 75,000 years old, show that people were stringing small objects to wear long before history began. Whether they were protective, decorative or a sign of belonging, we cannot know.
Around 3200 BCE, builders in the Boyne Valley of Ireland carved spirals into the great stones of Newgrange, among them the triple spiral now linked with the Triskele. Its original meaning is lost. The form has nevertheless become one of the best loved symbols of Ireland.
Egypt and the first great amulet culture
Egypt gives us the richest early record. By about 3000 BCE the Ankh appears in writing and art as the sign for life. Around 2300 BCE, late in the Old Kingdom, wedjat eye amulets begin to appear in burials, and by about 2000 BCE scarab amulets and seals were spreading across the country.
Glass followed. Around 1500 BCE, glassmakers in Egypt and Mesopotamia were producing beads, among them early eye beads, the distant forerunners of today’s blue nazar.
Egyptian makers favoured glazed , carved stone and gold, and they placed amulets with great care within mummy wrappings. On one of the gilded shrines of Tutankhamun, made around 1325 BCE, tail-biting serpents encircle a mummy-shaped figure: an early ancestor of the ouroboros, which later passed into Greek alchemy.
Ideas across the ancient world
In India, the early Upanishads of roughly the seventh century BCE praise the sacred syllable Om. In southern Italy, the followers of Pythagoras, active around 500 BCE, are said by later writers to have used the five-pointed star as a sign of health and of recognition among themselves.
In 221 BCE, when Qin unified China, its round coin with a square hole became the standard across the empire. That shape later carried countless charm coins tied with red cord. A few decades on, around 190 BCE, the Roman playwright Plautus mentions the lunula, the crescent pendant given to Roman girls.
Roman childhood was full of such guardians. Freeborn boys wore a rounded locket called a bulla and girls the lunula, and both were set aside as the child came of age. Their parents hoped the little pendants would keep envy and misfortune at a distance during the most fragile years.
Before Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, someone scratched the Sator square, a Latin word square that reads the same in four directions, on walls at Pompeii. It went on to be copied as a protective charm on walls, amulets and manuscripts for well over a thousand years.
Interlace, hammers and horseshoes
Around 800 CE, the makers of the Book of Kells filled its pages with knotwork, including the three-cornered triquetra. A century later, around 900 CE, small pendants in the shape of Thor’s hammer, Mjölnir, were worn across Viking Age Scandinavia.
In 988 Saint Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, died. Much later legend credits him with nailing a horseshoe to the Devil’s hoof and freeing him only on the promise never to enter a house with a Horseshoe over the door.
In 1348, a hand was carved on the Gate of Justice at the Alhambra in Granada, recalling the open hand known across North Africa and the Near East as the hamsa. On his journey to the Mali Empire in 1352, the traveller Ibn Battuta noted that cowrie shells were used there as money.
In the same centuries, learned manuals such as the Picatrix, translated in Castile in the thirteenth century, described how talismans were to be engraved under chosen stars. Renaissance scholars took up the idea, and the pentagram reappeared as a seal in their books.
Print, collectors and the modern record
In 1620 the English writer John Melton listed among popular beliefs that whoever finds four-leaved grass in a field will soon find some good thing, one of the earliest records of the lucky four-leaf clover.
In 1817, Thomas Bowdich, a member of a British mission to the Asante capital of Kumasi, collected an cloth, one of the earliest surviving examples of the stamped symbols that include sankofa. In 1852, Utagawa Hiroshige showed a beckoning cat, the Maneki-neko, in a woodblock print of Edo.
In 1860 the Icelandic Huld manuscript recorded the vegvísir among its signs. Finally, in 1929 the ethnologist Frances Densmore described the spider web charms that Ojibwe families hung on the hoops of cradleboards, the tradition behind today’s Dreamcatcher.
Through the twentieth century, travel, museums and mass production carried these symbols far beyond their homelands. An Egyptian ankh, an Irish spiral or an Akan proverb sign could now be bought, worn and loved almost anywhere, often by people who were meeting its story for the first time.
The dates mark when a symbol enters the record, not when people first imagined it.
What the timeline shows
Three patterns stand out. First, many of the oldest objects whose purpose we understand were guardians, made to protect the living and the dead. Luck, love and prosperity are there too, but protection leads.
Second, materials follow technology. Carved stone gives way to faience, glass, cast metal, woven fibre and finally print, and each new craft brings talismans to more people.
Third, symbols travel and change. A Neolithic spiral, a Roman crescent and a Japanese shop cat can end up on the same charm bracelet, each carrying a little of its first meaning and a good deal of new ones. To see how these ideas grew within a single culture, explore the talismans of ancient Egypt.
taliaris describes beliefs and customs; it makes no claim that a talisman has an effect.