amuletsTalismanic shirtپیراهن طلسمات

said pirâhan telesmat (Persian); tılsımlı gömlek (Turkish)

also: talisman shirt · tılsımlı gömlek · pirâhan telesmat · talismanic tunic

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A shirt covered in writing. Verses from the Qur'an, the names of God, the names of prophets, or numbers, laid across the cloth in blocks and grids and roundels, sometimes with astrological images or magic squares among them. Four types are distinguished by style and by which symbols they use: Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal and West African.

cited

When

late 14th century to the 19th; the tradition may be older cited

Period	Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal
How the date is known	a dated example survives
Note	Floor from the shirt in the Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum dated end of the 14th to beginning of the 15th century; ceiling from the Circassian shirt of Jembulat Boletoqo (1827–1836) and the Khalili Collection's 18th/19th-century Indian shirt. The cited account says the tradition might be much older than the earliest survivals and gives no figure. Living is set false because this project read no account of the shirts still being made.

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	Garment
Made of	Cloth · Ink
Goes	On the chest, under the shirt
Made by	commissioned; Sultan Cem's shirt records the start and end dates of its own making, and Suleiman's was commissioned by his wife
It says	Qur'anic verses, the names of Allah, the names of prophets, numbers, and on some shirts the holy sites of Mecca and Medina (Arabic)
Retired	no — it is kept
Note	Worn is given as chest because the vocabulary has no key for a whole garment; the shirt goes on the body. 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.

Blades and bullets — invulnerability charms; reported, never recommended citedsaid by Hürrem Sultan, who gave Suleiman the Magnificent a talismanic shirt and told him its inscriptions would protect him from bullets
War citedsaid by the cited account, which finds that although the shirts could be worn against many evils, most seem intended as a shield in battle
Illness — sickness in general, where no cause is named citedsaid by Surah Yusuf, in which the prophet Joseph's shirt cures his father's blindnessQur'an 12:93, quoted in the cited article as the tradition's own model for the object
Go with this my shirt, and cast it over the face of my father: he will come to see
Bad luck, unspecified citedsaid by the inscribed names themselves, which the tradition holds capable of offering protection and guidance to the carrier

The story

The shirt has a scriptural warrant, and it is a specific one. In Surah Yusuf, Joseph's shirt protects him and works miracles; he sends it to cure his father's blindness. "Go with this my shirt, and cast it over the face of my father: he will come to see" — Qur'an 12:93. A shirt that heals by being put on a body is the model, and the shirts follow it.

Most of them, though, are for battle. The Ottoman ruler Suleiman the Magnificent was given one by his wife Hürrem Sultan, who told him its inscriptions would protect him from bullets. His shirt is in the Topkapı Palace Museum, along with one made for Sultan Cem in 1480, while Cem was still a şehzade — unusual in that the beginning and the end of its manufacture are both inscribed on it, which makes it one of the few objects in this atlas that dates itself.

The earliest surviving shirts were made in or near the fifteenth century; one in the Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum in Istanbul is dated to the end of the fourteenth or the beginning of the fifteenth. The cited account adds that the tradition might be much older, and does not say how much. Two of the Khalili Collection's four shirts, from seventeenth-century Turkey and sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Mughal India, are covered with the holy sites of Mecca and Medina alongside prayers and Qur'anic extracts; the Turkish one is unusual for depicting the sites realistically rather than schematically. The latest named example belonged to Jembulat Boletoqo, Chemguy Grand Prince of Circassia from 1827 to 1836, and is displayed at the National Museum of the Republic of Adygea.

Inference — every other written charm in this batch is small enough to hide. This one is a garment, which means it is either worn under armour where nobody sees it or worn where everybody does. The atlas has read no account of which, and says so.

cited

Where you can see one

The Metropolitan Museum of Art — a talismanic shirt from northern India or the Deccan, 15th–early 16th century
Another collection — Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul — the shirt made for Sultan Cem in 1480 and the shirt commissioned for Suleiman the Magnificent; the Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum, Istanbul — a shirt from Bursa, end of the 14th to beginning of the 15th century; the Khalili Collections — four shirts; the National Museum of the Republic of Adygea — the shirt of Jembulat Boletoqo

An accession number appears here only where it was read off a catalogue page that is linked. No link, no number.