{
 "schema": 1,
 "id": "cowrie-strand",
 "type": "amulet",
 "names": {
  "name": "Cowrie strand",
  "said": "COW-ree, from Hindi कौडि kaudi",
  "aliases": [
   "cowry shells",
   "buzios",
   "miigis shells",
   "whiteshells",
   "bulikula",
   "nzimbu"
  ]
 },
 "etymology": {
  "root": "Hindi कौडि kaudi, from Sanskrit कपर्द kaparda. The Italian word for the shell, porcellana, is where English gets 'porcelain', from the resemblance.",
  "note": "In Ojibwe the shells used in Midewiwin ceremonies are miigis or whiteshells, and Whiteshell Provincial Park in Manitoba is named for them. In the Kingdom of Kongo the shell currency was nzimbu or zimbo, but that was a different snail — Olivella nana, harvested at Luanda Island.",
  "tier": "cited",
  "source": "s:wp-cowrie"
 },
 "region": [
  "west-africa",
  "east-africa",
  "ancient-egypt",
  "south-asia",
  "pacific",
  "brazil",
  "north-america"
 ],
 "countries": [
  "NG",
  "BJ",
  "SL",
  "KE",
  "EG",
  "IL",
  "IN",
  "NP",
  "FJ",
  "BR",
  "CA",
  "GH"
 ],
 "facets": {
  "era": "ancient",
  "status": "living",
  "portable": "worn",
  "restricted": "limited",
  "hemisphere": [
   "N",
   "S",
   "E",
   "W"
  ]
 },
 "text": {
  "what": "Small sea-snail shells, egg-shaped, glossy, with a long toothed slit down the flat underside. Strung on cord, sewn onto cloth, hung at the neck, or thrown in handfuls. Most run about the size of a thumbnail; the family runs from 5 mm to 19 cm across its species. The money cowrie, Monetaria moneta, is the one that travelled.",
  "story": "This is the only amulet in the atlas that was also, for centuries and across three continents, money. Cowries were used as currency by Africans for centuries, and the money cowrie was almost impossible to counterfeit until the late nineteenth century. The Classical Chinese character for money, 貝, began as a stylised drawing of a Maldivian cowrie shell, and characters for money, property and wealth still carry it as a radical.\n\nThe volume matters for what follows. After the 1500s European traders, chiefly through the slave trade, moved huge numbers of Maldivian cowries into Africa; between 1500 and 1875 at least 30 billion were imported to the Bight of Benin, making up 44% of the total value of trade there. Around 1850 the German explorer Heinrich Barth found them still in use at Kano, Kuka, Gando and Timbuktu, and reported that in Muniyoma, an old division of Bornu, the king's revenue was reckoned at 30,000,000 shells, with every adult male owing 1,000 a year for himself, 1,000 for each pack-ox and 2,000 for each enslaved person he held. In parts of British West Africa cowries were accepted for tax until the early twentieth century, and their use as currency persisted in unregulated settings into the 1960s. Ghana's national currency, introduced in 1965, is the cedi, named after the shell.\n\nWhat the shell does when it is not money is spread just as far. Yoruba diviners in West Africa cast cowries, as do the annual customs of Dahomey in Benin. In Brazil, as a result of the Atlantic slave trade, the shells — búzios — are cast to consult the Orixás and to hear their replies. The Kaniyar Panicker astrologers of Kerala used them among their devices. In West Bengal a cowrie is the token fare for the departed soul's ferry across the Vaitarani, and cowries are used at cremations and in the worship of Lakshmi. In Nepal sixteen are thrown in a gambling game at Tihar, and in the same festival the shells are worshipped as a sign of Lakshmi and of wealth.\n\nAs a charm it is tied to the body and to birth. In certain parts of Africa cowries were prized charms, said to be associated with fecundity, sexual pleasure and good luck. In Mende and in Kikuyu culture the shells stand for womanhood, fertility, birth and wealth. One modern ethnographic author reads the underside as a vulva or an eye — the source attributes that reading rather than asserting it, and so does this atlas.\n\nAnd it goes in graves. In predynastic Egypt and the Neolithic southern Levant, cowries were placed in the graves of young girls, and modified Levantine cowries were found ritually arranged around the skull in female burials. In the Bronze Age they became more common as funerary goods, again with women and children. Egypt made an imitation of it: the cowroid, a seal amulet in the shape of a cowrie, with copies in stone or faience appearing in the early second millennium BCE.\n\nThe Ojibwe use miigis shells in Midewiwin ceremonies, and how shells from a warm-sea species reached that far inland and that far north is an open question. Oral stories and birch-bark scrolls say the shells were found in the ground, or washed up on the shores of lakes and rivers.\n\nOn the Fiji Islands, a golden cowrie — bulikula, Cypraea aurantium — was drilled at both ends and worn on a string at the neck by chieftains as a badge of rank.",
  "how": "Drilled at the ends or ground open on the back, then strung, sewn or hung. In divination they are not worn at all but thrown: a set number goes down and the reading is made from which ones land aperture-up. That same throw is a dice mechanism in Pachisi and Ashta Chamma.",
  "today": "Still worn, still cast, still sold by the sack in West African and Indian markets. The cedi is still named after it. As of 2026 this project has read no source that dates the end of any of these uses."
 },
 "restricted": {
  "note": "This record does not describe Midewiwin ceremony. The Ojibwe use of miigis shells is named here and stops there: what the shells do in that ceremony is not printed, and no neighbouring practice is used to fill the gap.",
  "who_says": "this atlas's own rule on restricted knowledge, applied because the source names the ceremony without describing it and this project has read no Ojibwe publication authorising more",
  "source": "s:wp-ojibwe"
 },
 "dating": {
  "period": "Predynastic Egypt and the Neolithic Levant to the present",
  "from_year": -2999,
  "to_year": null,
  "living": true,
  "label": "from predynastic Egypt to now",
  "method": "excavated",
  "circa": true,
  "tier": "cited",
  "source": "s:wp-cowrie",
  "note": "from_year is the source's predynastic Egyptian and Neolithic southern Levantine burials; c. 3000 BCE is the conventional close of Egypt's predynastic period, taken from s:wp-taweret, and is this project's arithmetic on the source's period name. The monetary use is separately dated by the source to more than 3000 years ago in China."
 },
 "object": {
  "form": "bead",
  "materials": [
   "cowrie",
   "shell",
   "thread"
  ],
  "worn": [
   "neck",
   "waist",
   "hair",
   "grave",
   "pocket"
  ],
  "made_by": "no restriction named in the sources read here for the charm; divination with them is a diviner's work",
  "inscription": "none",
  "colour": [
   "white",
   "cream",
   "gold"
  ],
  "count": 16,
  "single_use": false,
  "source": "s:wp-cowrie",
  "note": "The count is one published case and not a rule: sixteen cowries are tossed in the Nepali game at Tihar, and six or seven in Pachisi. Shell sizes run 5 mm to 19 cm across the family, so no single length_mm is entered."
 },
 "against": [
  {
   "harm": "infertility",
   "who": "users in certain parts of Africa, where the source says cowries were prized charms 'associated with fecundity, sexual pleasure, and good luck'",
   "source": "s:wp-cowrie",
   "tier": "cited"
  },
  {
   "harm": "bad-luck",
   "who": "the same users, in the same sentence",
   "source": "s:wp-cowrie",
   "tier": "cited"
  },
  {
   "harm": "poverty",
   "who": "worshippers of Lakshmi, who use cowries in her worship and treat them at Tihar as a sign of the goddess and of wealth",
   "source": "s:wp-cowrie",
   "tier": "cited"
  },
  {
   "harm": "the-dead",
   "who": "West Bengali funerary practice, where a cowrie is the token fare for the departed soul's ferry across the Vaitarani; and predynastic Egyptian and Neolithic Levantine burials, where cowries were arranged around the skull in female graves",
   "source": "s:wp-cowrie",
   "tier": "cited"
  },
  {
   "harm": "childbirth",
   "who": "Mende and Kikuyu users, for whom the source says the shells stand for womanhood, fertility and birth",
   "source": "s:wp-cowrie",
   "tier": "cited"
  }
 ],
 "kin": [
  {
   "to": "cowrie",
   "as": "the material this object is — and the only material in the atlas that was legal tender for tax in living memory",
   "rel": "material"
  },
  {
   "to": "west-african-charm-craft",
   "as": "the tradition that casts them for divination, in Ifá and in the customs of Dahomey",
   "rel": "tradition"
  },
  {
   "to": "eye",
   "as": "the sign one modern ethnographic author reads in the shell's slit underside — an attribution the source makes and this atlas repeats as an attribution",
   "rel": "motif"
  },
  {
   "to": "charm-coin",
   "as": "the other object here that is money and charm at once, cast in bronze rather than grown in the sea",
   "rel": "parallel"
  },
  {
   "to": "scarab",
   "as": "the Egyptian seal-amulet whose cowrie-shaped cousin, the cowroid, copies this shell in stone and faience from the early second millennium BCE",
   "rel": "kin"
  },
  {
   "to": "grave-deposit",
   "as": "the practice that put them around the skulls of girls in predynastic Egypt and the Neolithic Levant",
   "rel": "practice"
  },
  {
   "to": "counting-beads",
   "as": "the practice of handling a set number, which here becomes a throw and a reading",
   "rel": "practice"
  },
  {
   "to": "akodessewa-market",
   "as": "a West African market where shells and charm materials are traded by the sack",
   "rel": "place"
  },
  {
   "to": "hei-matau",
   "as": "another shell-and-sea charm worn at the neck, on the far side of the Pacific",
   "rel": "parallel"
  },
  {
   "to": "who-owns-a-charm",
   "as": "the long read this shell complicates: 30 billion of them reached the Bight of Benin as trade goods in the era of Atlantic slavery",
   "rel": "story"
  }
 ],
 "links": [
  {
   "label": "Cowrie — Wikipedia",
   "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowrie"
  }
 ],
 "sources": [
  "s:wp-cowrie",
  "s:wp-shell-money",
  "s:wp-ojibwe",
  "s:wp-west-african-vod-n",
  "s:wp-amulet"
 ],
 "provenance": {
  "default": {
   "tier": "cited",
   "source": "s:wp-cowrie"
  },
  "fields": {
   "dating": {
    "tier": "cited",
    "source": "s:wp-cowrie",
    "note": "the from_year converts the source's period name to a year; the conversion is named in the note"
   },
   "text.today": {
    "tier": "inference",
    "note": "the market presence is reasoned from the practices the source describes in the present tense; no market source was read"
   }
  }
 },
 "images": [],
 "x_commons_files": [
  "File:Cowrie shells.jpg",
  "File:Monetaria moneta 01.JPG"
 ],
 "confidence": "high",
 "updated": "2026-09-16",
 "blurb": "Small sea-snail shells, egg-shaped, glossy, with a long toothed slit down the flat underside. Strung on cord, sewn onto cloth, hung at the neck, or thrown in handfuls.",
 "region_terms": [
  {
   "key": "west-africa",
   "name": "West Africa",
   "hemi": [
    "N",
    "W",
    "E"
   ]
  },
  {
   "key": "east-africa",
   "name": "East Africa and the Horn",
   "hemi": [
    "N",
    "S",
    "E"
   ]
  },
  {
   "key": "ancient-egypt",
   "name": "Ancient Egypt",
   "hemi": [
    "N",
    "E"
   ],
   "note": "Nile valley and delta, Predynastic through Roman Egypt"
  },
  {
   "key": "south-asia",
   "name": "South Asia",
   "hemi": [
    "N",
    "E"
   ]
  },
  {
   "key": "pacific",
   "name": "The Pacific",
   "hemi": [
    "N",
    "S",
    "E",
    "W"
   ],
   "note": "Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia"
  },
  {
   "key": "brazil",
   "name": "Brazil",
   "hemi": [
    "S",
    "W"
   ]
  },
  {
   "key": "north-america",
   "name": "North America",
   "hemi": [
    "N",
    "W"
   ]
  }
 ],
 "hemispheres": [
  "E",
  "N",
  "S",
  "W"
 ],
 "kin_out": [
  {
   "to": "cowrie",
   "type": "material",
   "name": "Cowrie",
   "as": "the material this object is — and the only material in the atlas that was legal tender for tax in living memory",
   "rel": "material"
  },
  {
   "to": "west-african-charm-craft",
   "type": "tradition",
   "name": "West African charm craft",
   "as": "the tradition that casts them for divination, in Ifá and in the customs of Dahomey",
   "rel": "tradition"
  },
  {
   "to": "eye",
   "type": "motif",
   "name": "The eye",
   "as": "the sign one modern ethnographic author reads in the shell's slit underside — an attribution the source makes and this atlas repeats as an attribution",
   "rel": "motif"
  },
  {
   "to": "charm-coin",
   "type": "amulet",
   "name": "Chinese charm coin",
   "as": "the other object here that is money and charm at once, cast in bronze rather than grown in the sea",
   "rel": "parallel"
  },
  {
   "to": "scarab",
   "type": "amulet",
   "name": "Scarab",
   "as": "the Egyptian seal-amulet whose cowrie-shaped cousin, the cowroid, copies this shell in stone and faience from the early second millennium BCE",
   "rel": "kin"
  },
  {
   "to": "grave-deposit",
   "type": "practice",
   "name": "Grave deposit",
   "as": "the practice that put them around the skulls of girls in predynastic Egypt and the Neolithic Levant",
   "rel": "practice"
  },
  {
   "to": "counting-beads",
   "type": "practice",
   "name": "Counting beads",
   "as": "the practice of handling a set number, which here becomes a throw and a reading",
   "rel": "practice"
  },
  {
   "to": "akodessewa-market",
   "type": "place",
   "name": "Akodessawa fetish market",
   "as": "a West African market where shells and charm materials are traded by the sack",
   "rel": "place"
  },
  {
   "to": "hei-matau",
   "type": "amulet",
   "name": "Hei matau",
   "as": "another shell-and-sea charm worn at the neck, on the far side of the Pacific",
   "rel": "parallel"
  },
  {
   "to": "who-owns-a-charm",
   "type": "story",
   "name": "Who owns a charm",
   "as": "the long read this shell complicates: 30 billion of them reached the Bight of Benin as trade goods in the era of Atlantic slavery",
   "rel": "story"
  }
 ],
 "source_list": [
  {
   "id": "s:wp-cowrie",
   "kind": "encyclopedia",
   "title": "Cowrie",
   "publisher": "Wikipedia",
   "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowrie",
   "accessed": "2026-09-16",
   "license": "CC BY-SA 4.0"
  },
  {
   "id": "s:wp-shell-money",
   "kind": "encyclopedia",
   "title": "Shell money",
   "publisher": "Wikipedia",
   "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_money",
   "accessed": "2026-09-16",
   "license": "CC BY-SA 4.0"
  },
  {
   "id": "s:wp-ojibwe",
   "kind": "encyclopedia",
   "title": "Ojibwe",
   "publisher": "Wikipedia",
   "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ojibwe",
   "accessed": "2026-09-16",
   "license": "CC BY-SA 4.0"
  },
  {
   "id": "s:wp-west-african-vod-n",
   "kind": "encyclopedia",
   "title": "West African Vodún",
   "publisher": "Wikipedia",
   "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_African_Vod%C3%BAn",
   "accessed": "2026-09-16",
   "license": "CC BY-SA 4.0"
  },
  {
   "id": "s:wp-amulet",
   "kind": "encyclopedia",
   "title": "Amulet",
   "publisher": "Wikipedia",
   "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amulet",
   "accessed": "2026-09-16",
   "license": "CC BY-SA 4.0"
  }
 ],
 "tiers": {
  "text.what": {
   "tier": "cited",
   "source": "s:wp-cowrie"
  },
  "text.story": {
   "tier": "cited",
   "source": "s:wp-cowrie"
  },
  "text.how": {
   "tier": "cited",
   "source": "s:wp-cowrie"
  },
  "text.today": {
   "tier": "inference",
   "note": "the market presence is reasoned from the practices the source describes in the present tense; no market source was read"
  },
  "etymology": {
   "tier": "cited",
   "source": "s:wp-cowrie"
  },
  "dating": {
   "tier": "cited",
   "source": "s:wp-cowrie",
   "note": "the from_year converts the source's period name to a year; the conversion is named in the note"
  },
  "object": {
   "tier": "cited",
   "source": "s:wp-cowrie"
  }
 },
 "primary_image": null,
 "tag_facts": [],
 "recognition_facts": [],
 "acclaim": 0,
 "against_facts": [
  {
   "key": "infertility",
   "label": "Infertility",
   "who": "users in certain parts of Africa, where the source says cowries were prized charms 'associated with fecundity, sexual pleasure, and good luck'",
   "quote": "",
   "source": "s:wp-cowrie",
   "tier": "cited",
   "note": ""
  },
  {
   "key": "bad-luck",
   "label": "Bad luck, unspecified",
   "who": "the same users, in the same sentence",
   "quote": "",
   "source": "s:wp-cowrie",
   "tier": "cited",
   "note": ""
  },
  {
   "key": "poverty",
   "label": "Poverty",
   "who": "worshippers of Lakshmi, who use cowries in her worship and treat them at Tihar as a sign of the goddess and of wealth",
   "quote": "",
   "source": "s:wp-cowrie",
   "tier": "cited",
   "note": ""
  },
  {
   "key": "the-dead",
   "label": "Danger to the dead",
   "gloss": "charms put in a grave for the person in it",
   "who": "West Bengali funerary practice, where a cowrie is the token fare for the departed soul's ferry across the Vaitarani; and predynastic Egyptian and Neolithic Levantine burials, where cowries were arranged around the skull in female graves",
   "quote": "",
   "source": "s:wp-cowrie",
   "tier": "cited",
   "note": ""
  },
  {
   "key": "childbirth",
   "label": "Death in childbirth",
   "who": "Mende and Kikuyu users, for whom the source says the shells stand for womanhood, fertility and birth",
   "quote": "",
   "source": "s:wp-cowrie",
   "tier": "cited",
   "note": ""
  }
 ],
 "material_facts": [
  {
   "key": "cowrie",
   "label": "Cowrie",
   "kind": "organic"
  },
  {
   "key": "shell",
   "label": "Shell",
   "kind": "organic"
  },
  {
   "key": "thread",
   "label": "Thread and cord",
   "kind": "textile",
   "note": "red thread runs from the Mediterranean to Mongolia"
  }
 ],
 "worn_facts": [
  {
   "key": "neck",
   "label": "At the neck",
   "group": "body",
   "note": "the world's default position"
  },
  {
   "key": "waist",
   "label": "At the waist",
   "group": "body"
  },
  {
   "key": "hair",
   "label": "In the hair",
   "group": "body"
  },
  {
   "key": "grave",
   "label": "In the grave",
   "group": "placed",
   "note": "most surviving ancient amulets are here because somebody was buried in them"
  },
  {
   "key": "pocket",
   "label": "In a pocket or a bag",
   "group": "carried"
  }
 ],
 "form_fact": {
  "key": "bead",
  "label": "Bead"
 },
 "holding_facts": [],
 "span": "3000 BCE to now",
 "country_names": [
  {
   "iso": "NG",
   "name": "Nigeria"
  },
  {
   "iso": "BJ",
   "name": "Benin"
  },
  {
   "iso": "SL",
   "name": "Sierra Leone"
  },
  {
   "iso": "KE",
   "name": "Kenya"
  },
  {
   "iso": "EG",
   "name": "Egypt"
  },
  {
   "iso": "IL",
   "name": "Israel"
  },
  {
   "iso": "IN",
   "name": "India"
  },
  {
   "iso": "NP",
   "name": "Nepal"
  },
  {
   "iso": "FJ",
   "name": "Fiji"
  },
  {
   "iso": "BR",
   "name": "Brazil"
  },
  {
   "iso": "CA",
   "name": "Canada"
  },
  {
   "iso": "GH",
   "name": "Ghana"
  }
 ],
 "kin_in": [
  {
   "from": "charm-coin",
   "type": "amulet",
   "name": "Chinese charm coin",
   "as": "what the burial money started as, before replica coins replaced shells to deter grave robbers",
   "rel": "origin"
  },
  {
   "from": "patua",
   "type": "amulet",
   "name": "Patuá",
   "as": "the other object built from the same shell, strung instead of sewn in",
   "rel": "kin"
  },
  {
   "from": "west-african-charm-craft",
   "type": "tradition",
   "name": "West African charm craft",
   "as": "the shells this tradition casts to get answers, and wears for fertility and luck",
   "rel": "carries"
  },
  {
   "from": "cowrie",
   "type": "material",
   "name": "Cowrie",
   "as": "the strung form of this shell, and the amulet most of the world means when it says cowrie",
   "rel": "carried-by"
  },
  {
   "from": "counting-beads",
   "type": "practice",
   "name": "Counting beads",
   "as": "the other fixed-number string in this atlas, where handling a set number becomes a throw and a reading rather than a tally",
   "rel": "contrast"
  }
 ]
}