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The talismanic shirt is the grand version. Worn textile talismans are found throughout the Muslim world and group into four types — Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal and West African — inscribed with verses from the Qur'an, the names of God and of prophets, or with numbers, and sometimes carrying images or symbols including astrological ones. Most seem intended as a shield in battle. Hürrem Sultan gave one to Suleiman the Magnificent and told him its inscriptions would protect him from bullets. The textual backing is Surah Yusuf, where Joseph's shirt heals his father's blindness: "Go with this my shirt, and cast it over the face of my father: he will come to see."

And here is the sentence this record exists for: the earliest surviving examples were made in or near the fifteenth century, though the tradition of talismanic shirts might be much older. That is what a survival gap looks like when somebody writes it down.

The commonest form is a bag. A gris-gris is a small cloth pouch, usually holding Qur'anic scripture written on paper together with herbs, worn round the neck; non-Muslims in the same region wore them under the name saffis. Across the Atlantic the Hoodoo mojo bag is a flannel bag, and most Southern-style conjure bags are red flannel — a choice traced to Bakongo minkisi, with red standing for protection and spiritual power, and research from the National Museum of African American History and Culture noting that red signifies sacrifice, transition and power in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of Congo and Gabon. When red cloth was not to hand, people used whatever cloth they had. Enslaved quilt makers sewed mojo hands into quilts, a technique traced from Mississippi and Alabama to Connecticut. Japan's omamori are small items kept inside a brocade bag; they were originally made of paper or wood, and the bag came later.

Cloth also counts. A senninbari is a strip of cloth carrying a thousand stitches, each normally sewn by a different woman and given to a soldier leaving for war, typically 15 cm wide and 90 to 120 cm long, most often white cloth with a thousand red stitches. The custom began in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95. Tibetan lung ta prayer flags are squares or rectangles strung along their top edges on a long thread and hung from high to low; darchog are single rectangles fixed to poles and planted in ground, cairns and rooftops.

Europe wore its cloth on the shoulders. The monastic scapular appears perhaps as early as the seventh century in the Order of Saint Benedict, a length of cloth hanging front and back, and item 55 of the Rule of Saint Benedict refers to it; the devotional scapular that grew out of it is two small rectangles of cloth, wood or laminated paper a few inches across, joined by two bands, one square on the chest and one down the back. In Alsace, southern Germany and Switzerland, Jewish boys wore textile neckbands at their brit milah with a coin or a piece of coloured coral set in the middle, to draw the evil eye away from the child during the circumcision; the practice continued into the early twentieth century.

Cloth is also a component taken from a person. Curse tablets included hair or pieces of clothing, to give the spell the ousia — the central essence — of the target.

Inference — textiles need to be dry, frozen or airless to last, and almost nowhere is. Set the fifteenth-century shirts against the ten thousand years of weaving behind them and the conclusion is not that cloth charms are recent; it is that cloth charms are invisible.

Cut and sewn, or woven and inscribed, or stitched by many hands in sequence. Most cloth charms have an end written into them: a senninbari goes to war, a prayer flag is left to weather, a mojo bag is made for one client and one purpose and cannot be reused for another.

The senninbari records its own dissent, which is rare in this field: the cited account says some soldiers rejected the idea that the belt could protect them and carried it instead as a keepsake of the women who made it. Both positions are in the same source, from the same object, and this record prints both.