amuletsHoly rider pendant

also: rider saint amulet · Sisinnios amulet · Solomon amulet · hystera amulet · Abyzou amulet

amuletAnatoliaGreece and the AegeanThe LevantAncient EgyptTurkey Greece Egyptconfidence mediumneeds checking

A small disc or pendant, bronze on the early Byzantine examples and lead on the medieval ones. One face carries the scene: a standing figure whipping a bound kneeling woman, or — on the later type — a horseman trampling her under the hooves. The other face often carries a whirling face-like device read as a womb, the hystera, sometimes ringed by an ouroboros, a snake biting its own tail. Everybody in the scene is labelled.

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When

early Byzantine bronzes and medieval lead amulets inference

Period	Early Byzantine to medieval
How the date is known	art-historical — dated by style
Note	The cited article describes 'early Byzantine bronze amulets' and a medieval lead variation without printing centuries in the text this project read. The years here turn those two words into a span and should be checked against Jeffrey Spier, 'Medieval Byzantine Magical Amulets and Their Tradition', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 56 (1993), which the article cites.

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	Copper and bronze · Lead
Goes	At the neck
Made by	not recorded in the cited article
It says	Flee, flee, Abyzou, [from] Sisinios and Sisinnia; the voracious dog dwells here (Greek)
Note	The inscription quoted is the reverse of one bronze amulet, written inside an ouroboros. 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.

Death in childbirth citedsaid by the amulets themselves, which name the demon blamed for miscarriage and order her away
Flee, flee, Abyzou, [from] Sisinios and Sisinnia; the voracious dog dwells here.
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 the Testament of Solomon, in which the demon says she walks the world looking for women about to give birth and strangles newborns
Demons and night-hags citedsaid by the amulet's own labels: Solomon, Arlaph or Saint Sisinnios doing the driving off
The evil eye — harm carried by a look, often an admiring one citedsaid by the Bawit wall painting, which sets the piercing of the evil eye in the same composition as the trampled demon
Illness — sickness in general, where no cause is named citedsaid by the Testament of Solomon, where the demon also claims deafness, eye trouble, obstructions of the throat, madness and bodily pain

The story

The woman on the pendant is Abyzou, the demon blamed for miscarriage and infant mortality, and said to be driven by envy because she is infertile herself. She is Alabasandria in Coptic Egypt and Gylou in Byzantine Greek, and in the texts she has more names than anyone can count. In the Testament of Solomon she tells the king she never sleeps, that she walks the world looking for women about to give birth, and that she will strangle a newborn if she gets the chance.

The amulets take the healing-charm grammar of the late antique Mediterranean — address the affliction by name and order it out — and apply it to her. One bronze amulet labels the standing figure Arlaph and reads "The Seal of Solomon [is] with the bearer; I am Noskam." The reverse, written inside the ouroboros, reads: "Flee, flee, Abyzou, [from] Sisinios and Sisinnia; the voracious dog dwells here."

Who does the driving off varies: Solomon, or Arlaph — called Afarof in the Testament of Solomon and identified with the archangel Raphael — or, on Christian examples, Saint Sisinnios. On one medieval piece the rider is Sisinnios, the demon is named twice over as Abizou and Anabardalea, and an angel called Araph stands by with one wing raised.

The same scene exists in paint. At the monastery of St Apollo in Bawit, in Egypt, a wall painting shows the childbirth demon named Alabasandria trampled under a horse; the rider wears a belted tunic and trousers in the Parthian style, and the inscription, faded by the time it was read, was read as Sisinnios. Round the central image are a centaur, the piercing of the evil eye, and the demon's winged, reptile-tailed daughter, named in her own inscription.

Inference — the amulets are usually described as protecting women in childbirth and their infants, and Jeffrey Spier's survey notes that some of the names of the people seeking protection on surviving examples are men's. Whatever these pendants were understood to be doing, they were not only for mothers.

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