signsThe hand

also: hand motif · apotropaic hand · khamsa hand · afus

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A human hand, cast or cut flat and hung where it can be seen. It comes in three postures this atlas keeps apart: the palm open with five fingers spread, the fist with the thumb pushed between two fingers, and two fingers extended with the thumb folded over. Each is a gesture first and an object second — the metal copies something a living hand does.

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When

c. 800 BCE to now still carried cited

Period	Iron Age to the present
How the date is known	excavated — dug up in a dated context
Note	Dated from the statement that one of the first appearances of the hamsa is in Israelite tombs of around 800 BCE. Open-hand motifs in the ancient Near East are older; no date for them was read.

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	Silver · Gold · Brass · Jet · Glass · Fired clay
Goes	At the neck · At the door · On a wall · On the wrist · In a vehicle
It says	Qur'anic verses on Morisco examples; Ave Maria gratia plena on a Nasrid-period gold pendant

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 carriers across North Africa and the Middle East, as reported of the hamsa
Demons and night-hags citedsaid by von Kemnitz, on hand-of-Ishtar amulets in Mesopotamia and Babylon, used to keep evil or disease out of a building
Infertility citedsaid by the names Hand-of-Venus and Hand-of-Mary attach to hand amulets said to help women's fertility and lactation
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 Asturian practice, where jet hands are given to young children

The story

Open-hand motifs run through the ancient Near East. Von Kemnitz records amulets of the hand of Ishtar used in Mesopotamia and Babylon to keep evil or disease from entering a building. At Khirbet el-Qom in Judah an Iron Age tomb carries an engraved hand beside an inscription; what it meant is argued over, and the usual reading is a protective sign in a funerary setting. One of the first appearances of the hand as the amulet now called the hamsa is in Israelite tombs of around 800 BCE.

The name it travels under is not one name. Khamsa is Arabic for five. Hand of Fatima is a label Europeans popularised in French colonial North Africa, not an Arabic term. Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews call it the hand of Miriam; Levantine Christians call it kef Miryam, the hand of Mary; in Berber languages afus is simply hand. One shape, five communities, five names, and the argument over which name to print is live.

In al-Andalus the hand is well documented from the thirteenth century onward. Among Moriscos in Granada, khamsa pendants were described as large engraved medals with a hand inscribed with letters, likely Qur'anic. A reform council banned them in 1526 as Islamic symbols and ordered crosses in their place; the Synod of Guadix renewed the ban in 1554. Christians wore them anyway — a Nasrid-period gold pendant is inscribed Ave Maria gratia plena.

Inference — filing the open palm, the fist and the horned hand as one family is this project's decision, not a claim any of their carriers make. What they share is a gesture arrested in metal and aimed outward. Each has its own record here.

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