signsThe crescentlunula

said LOO-noo-la, 'little moon'

also: lunula · increscent · decrescent · star and crescent · sickle moon

signRome and ItalyMesopotamiaThe LevantAnatoliaGreece and the AegeanThe MaghrebIranArabia and the GulfThe Baltic and the Slavic landsItaly Iraq Syria Turkey Greece Tunisia Algeria Iran Yemen Russia

A moon with its middle cut out, two horns and a curved back, hung point-up at the neck. Roman ones are gold. Isidore of Seville defines them as female ornaments in the likeness of the moon, little hanging gold bullae. The shape is a lune in geometry and a crescent in heraldry only when the horns point up.

cited

When

c. 2300 BCE to now still carried cited

Period	Akkadian to Roman, and still current as an emblem
How the date is known	art-historical — dated by style
Note	Start from the crescent for Nanna/Sin on Akkadian cylinder seals as early as 2300 BCE. The Roman lunula as a worn amulet is dated only by the Plautus references, which the source does not date.

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	Gold · Silver
Goes	At the neck
Made by	Roman goldsmiths; given, in the recorded cases, by a father or a household member
Colour	gold

What its carriers say it stops

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

The evil eye — harm carried by a look, often an admiring one citedsaid by Roman practice, in which amulets were worn especially against the evil eye
Demons and night-hags citedsaid by the same account: against evil forces, demons and sorcery
Another person's sorcery citedsaid by Roman practice, as recorded of amulets worn as talismans
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 wearers were girls; Isidore of Seville defines the lunula as a female ornament
Lunulae are female ornaments in the likeness of the moon, little hanging gold bullae.

The story

Rome gave the crescent to girls. A lunula was worn as an apotropaic amulet — a charm meant to turn harm away — and stood as the girl's equivalent of the boy's bulla. Romans wore amulets against evil forces, demons and sorcery, and above all against the evil eye. In Plautus's Epidicus, Epidicus asks the girl Telestis whether she remembers his bringing her a gold lunula on her birthday and a little gold ring for her finger; in Rudens, Palaestra says her father gave her a golden bulla on the day she was born. Lunulae were common across the whole Mediterranean, while the bulla stayed mostly Italian.

As a sign rather than an amulet the crescent is older and travels further. It stands for the moon and for the moon deity Nanna or Sin in Akkadian cylinder seals as early as 2300 BCE. Egypt's logograph for the moon is a crescent. Phoenicians carried it as far as Carthage and Numidia in the eighth century BCE. The star-and-crescent pair arises in the ancient Near East for the moon and Ishtar as the planet Venus, often with the solar disk as a third, and was inherited in Sassanian and Hellenistic iconography. It moved into Islamic iconography from Sassanian use after the Muslim conquest of Persia, and into Marian iconography in Christianity through the Woman of the Apocalypse, with the moon under her feet.

Inference — two different things share this outline and this atlas does not merge them. The Roman lunula is a birth-gift to a named child; the star-and-crescent is a dynastic and then a religious emblem. Nothing read here shows the second growing out of the first.

cited