amuletsHamsaخمسة

said KHAM-sa, Arabic for 'five'

also: khamsa · khmisa · Hand of Fatima · Hand of Miriam · Hand of Mary · hamesh · afus

amuletThe MaghrebThe LevantIberiaAnatoliaIranSouth AsiaMorocco Algeria Tunisia Egypt Israel Spain Turkey Iran Iraq India Pakistan

An open palm, usually made symmetrical so it has a thumb on both sides, in silver more often than anything else, historically also carved in jet. An eye is often set in the palm. Fingers spread turns evil away; fingers together brings luck; pointing up wards off, pointing down blesses. The most stylised versions stop looking like a hand at all and become five circles around a sixth. It is also painted in red on house walls, sometimes with the blood of a sacrificed animal, and hung on the doorway of a room where a woman is expecting or a baby has just arrived.

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Arabic khamsa, 'five' — the five fingers; Maghrebi variants khmisa and khmisa; Hebrew hamesh, also 'five'; Berber afus, 'hand'
'Hand of Fatima' is a colonial nickname rather than an Arabic term: Europeans in French colonial North Africa popularised Main de Fatma, and in colonial-era French 'fatma' meant a Muslim or Arab woman. The Arabic phrase yad Fatima is rare in pre-modern usage. Levantine Christians call it kef Miryam, the Virgin Mary's hand; Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews call it the Hand of Miriam. cited

When

claimed from c. 800 BCE; documented as an amulet from the 13th century CE; still worn still carried cited

Period	Iron Age to the present
How the date is known	art-historical — dated by style
Note	The 800 BCE floor is the cited article's statement that one of the first appearances was in Israelite tombs of that date, which it frames as speculation about Sephardi use rather than as an established lineage. The firm date in the article is al-Andalus from the thirteenth century onwards. Read the floor as the claim and the thirteenth century as the documentation.

Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.

The thing itself

Form	Pendant
Made of	Silver · Jet · Gold
Goes	At the neck · At the door · On a wall · In a vehicle · At the till · On a cradle
Made by	no restriction recorded; jewellers across North Africa and the Levant, and now factories everywhere
It says	on Morisco examples, letters likely to be Qur'anic verses; in Shia use, the names of the panjtan placed on the fingers (Arabic)
Colour	silver · red
Note	Silver is singled out in the cited article as a metal held to represent purity. No published measurement was read.

What its carriers say it stops

Reported, attributed, not tested here. Each row below is somebody's claim, with their name on it.

The evil eye — harm carried by a look, often an admiring one citedsaid by carriers across North Africa and the Middle East, who say khamsa fi ainek — 'five [fingers] in your eye'the spitting sound is part of the formula
Khamsa, Khamsa, Khamsa, tfu, tfu, tfu
Envy — a neighbour's ill will, named as such citedsaid by the same users; the evil eye is glossed in the cited article as a malicious stare held to cause illness, death or general misfortune
Harm to a child — harm to an infant or a small child; common across the atlas, though not the largest class in it — see /story/most-of-them-are-for-children/ citedsaid by households that paint or hang it on the doorway of a room holding an expectant mother or a new baby
Infertility citedsaid by the hand-amulet tradition the cited article traces it to — the Hand of Venus and the Hand of Mary, used to protect women from the eye, boost fertility and lactation and promote healthy pregnancies
Illness — sickness in general, where no cause is named citedsaid by the Mesopotamian precedent von Kemnitz names: amulets of the hand of Ishtar, used to keep evil or disease from entering a building

The story

The open hand is old in the Near East and the line back from the modern object is argued rather than established. Amulets of the hand of Ishtar were used in Mesopotamia and Babylon to keep evil or disease out of a building. An Iron Age tomb at Khirbet el-Qom in Judah carries an engraved hand beside an inscription, generally read as protective in a funerary setting, though the exact meaning is debated. Another line runs to the Mano Pantea, known to ancient Egyptians as the Two Fingers, where the two fingers are Isis and Osiris and the thumb is Horus, used to call a parent's protection over a child.

Eva-Maria von Kemnitz traces the medieval route in one sentence: "the Berbers brought the khamsa to al-Andalūs. Later, the expelled Muslim and Jewish population took it back to North Africa, introducing different motifs and techniques." In al-Andalus its use as an amulet is well documented from the thirteenth century on. Among the Moriscos of Granada, khamsa pendants were described as large engraved medals with a hand inscribed with letters — likely Qur'anic verses. A reform council banned them as Islamic symbols in 1526 and ordered crosses in their place; the Synod of Guadix renewed the prohibition in 1554. Christians wore them anyway, and a Nasrid-period gold pendant survives inscribed Ave Maria gratia plena.

The disagreement is live and it is not between insiders and outsiders. Von Kemnitz, citing Bruno Barbatti, calls the hamsa the most important apotropaic sign in the Islamic world. Salafi authorities reject it: one fatwa states that hanging the khamsa is impermissible, and another lists hands of Fatima among prohibited amulets. In Shia Islam the five fingers are read as the panjtan — Muhammad, Ali, Fatimah, Hasan, Husayn — with invocations written on the fingers, and the open palm became an emblem in Muharram processions and on ʿalams. In Judaism the hand doubles as the letter shin, first letter of Shaddai; Shalom Sabar suggests Jews exiled from Spain in 1492 carried it as protection into the countries they reached, while noting the assumption is hard to prove.

What people say while using it is the plainest evidence of what they take it for. Khamsa fi ainek — 'five [fingers] in your eye' — said while raising the right palm, fingers slightly apart, to blind the aggressor. Khamsa wa-khamis, 'five and Thursday'. Or the whole formula with the spitting sound: "Khamsa, Khamsa, Khamsa, tfu, tfu, tfu."

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Now

The hamsa is one of Algeria's national symbols and appears in its emblem. In Egypt it is the most popular amulet against the evil eye, ahead of the eye itself and the hirz; women in baladi quarters make khamaysa, five objects — peppers, hands, circles, stars — hung from hooks on a child's hair or black apron. Its use fell away in some places during periods of modernisation and came back as a secular good-luck charm: necklaces, keychains, postcards, lottery cards, advertisements, tilework, wall decorations. It was added to Unicode as U+1FAAC in 2021.

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