Amulet Atlas

materialsBone and ivory

also: ivory · tusk · whale ivory · scrimshaw

materialAncient EgyptMainland Southeast AsiaThe PacificSiberia and the ArcticWest AfricaIsland Southeast AsiaEgyptThailandUnited States of AmericaGreenlandFijiChinaUnited KingdomIndonesiaconfidence mediumneeds checking

Two related things a charm gets cut from: bone, from any animal including a human one, and ivory, meaning tusk — from African and Asian elephants above all, and also from hippopotamus, walrus, narwhal and mammoth. Both carve finely, take a polish, and yellow with handling. Both come out of a body, and every tradition that uses them says something about whose body it was.

cited

When

c. 4400 BCE to now still carried cited

PeriodPredynastic Egypt to the present
How the date is knownexcavated — dug up in a dated context
NoteDated from the Badarian Predynastic period, named as the source of the oldest Egyptian amulets, with bone among the listed materials. The Badarian is conventionally placed from about 4400 BCE and the source gives no closer year.

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.

What its carriers say it stops

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

The story

Bone is on the first list of Egyptian amulet materials: faience above all, then stone, metal, bone, wood and gold. It is still on the list four thousand years later and half a world away. Thai amulets are made from plaster, metal, wood or bone, sometimes with ash, monk's hair or temple relics worked into them. The palad khik, the Thai phallic charm, is made from wood, metal, bone, horn or ivory by monks who specialise in them, and engraving its inscriptions can take days.

In the Pacific the material is a tooth as much as a tusk. The lei niho palaoa, worn at the neck by Hawaiian ali'i of both sexes, is in its nineteenth-century form a whale tooth carved into a hook and hung on plaited human hair; precontact examples were under two inches long and were also made from shell, bone, wood, stone and coral. In Greenland a tupilaq was made by an angakkuq from animal parts — bone, skin, hair, sinew — and, in the accounts that survive, from parts taken from the corpses of children.

Inference — bone and ivory sit on the opposite side of the survival line from cloth and herb. They last in the ground, so they are heavily represented in museum trays, and they last in a collection, so they are heavily represented in the ethics literature too. Those are the same fact seen twice.

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Now

Ivory is the material in this atlas with the hardest live constraint on it. Asian elephant ivory was barred from international trade by a CITES Appendix One listing in 1975; the African elephant was moved to Appendix One in October 1989, enacted in January 1990. Through the 1980s about 75,000 African elephants a year were killed for the trade, and the African elephant population fell from roughly 1.3 million to 600,000 between 1979 and 1989. China ended its domestic ivory trade and processing, with commercial activity halting on 31 March 2017. The UK Ivory Act 2018 received Royal Assent on 20 December 2018. A museum drawer of ivory charms is therefore a drawer of objects that in most cases cannot lawfully be traded now, whatever they were when they were carved.

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What this is near

kinTooth, tusk and clawthe same body, one step along: a tusk is a tooth, and the Pacific charms cut from whale ivory are both records at oncecarried-byPalad khikcarved from wood, metal, bone, horn or ivory by monks who specialise in itcarried-byPhra khrueangpressed with bone, ash, hair and relics worked into the body of the tabletcarried-byTupilaqmade from bone, skin, hair and sinew, and in the accounts that survive from human remains toocarried-byHei matauthe hook cut from bone as readily as from pounamucarried-byInuit amuletthe Arctic charm cut from what the hunt provided, which is the whole of the material argument hereparallelRabbit's footthe same logic at the cheap end: a part of an animal, kept because it was part of an animalorgThe Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Actthe United States law that governs human remains and funerary objects in collections, and therefore some of this materialkinHairthe other material taken from a body, and the one that does not survive as wellstoryWho owns a charmthe long read for objects whose trade is now illegal and whose display is argued about

What names this one

Each in its own words, from its own page.

materialHei matauwhat most of them are carved from now — cattle bone, and whale bone under strict limitsmaterialInuit amuletthe material the Arctic works, and the one most of these are made frommaterialRabbit's footwhat is left after drying, and the reason these survive in collections at allmaterialTaweret amuletthe material of the Middle Kingdom wands her face is cut intomaterialTupilaqwhat the carved figures are cut from: sperm whale tooth, then narwhal and walrus tusk, then antlermaterialThe tooth and the clawthe neighbouring material, and what a whale tooth is filed as once it is carvedwholeTooth, tusk and clawthe wider class this sits inside, and the one that gets carved rather than kept whole

Where this came from

Elsewhere

Record updated 2026-09-16. This record as JSON. Every field carries its own provenance; the tier chips above say which.

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