signsThe open palmخمسة

said KHAM-sa, Arabic for five

also: khamsa · khmisa · hand of Fatima · hand of Miriam · hand of Mary · afus · Mano Pantea

signThe MaghrebThe LevantIberiaAnatoliaDiasporaMorocco Algeria Tunisia Libya Egypt Israel Palestine Syria Turkey Spain

A flat hand, palm forward, five fingers spread and usually symmetrical — the two outer fingers drawn as thumbs so the sign reads the same either way up. Cast in silver or brass, cut in gold, pressed in glass. An eye is often set in the middle of the palm. It hangs at a neck, over a door and off a mirror from Morocco to Iraq.

cited

When

c. 800 BCE to now, and well documented from the 13th century CE still carried cited

Period	Iron Age to the present
How the date is known	excavated — dug up in a dated context
Note	Earliest appearance dated from Israelite tombs of around 800 BCE; the continuous documented amulet tradition in al-Andalus starts in the 13th century.

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 · Glass
Goes	At the neck · At the door · On a wall · In a vehicle
It says	Qur'anic verses or phrases drawn from the Qur'an on Morisco examples
Counted	5

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
Infertility citedsaid by the Hand-of-Venus and Hand-of-Mary names, attached to hand amulets said to protect women, help lactation and strengthen a pregnancy
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 Mano Pantea reading, in which the sign calls a child's parents to protect it

The story

Five is the count and the name. The standard Arabic term is khamsa, five, with Maghrebi khmisa beside it. Hand of Fatima is a French colonial nickname, popularised by Europeans in North Africa rather than used in Arabic; in colonial-era French, fatma meant a Muslim or Arab woman. Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews say hand of Miriam. Levantine Christians say kef Miryam, hand of Mary. Berber afus just means hand.

Inside the Islamic world the amulet's documented use sits in the west — the Maghreb and historic al-Andalus — and is sparse in the Mashriq, where a hand in ritual use more often belongs to Shi'i iconography and not to this tradition. Von Kemnitz traces the route: Berbers brought the khamsa to al-Andalus; the expelled Muslim and Jewish population carried it back to North Africa with new motifs and techniques. In al-Andalus its use as an amulet is well documented from the thirteenth century.

The sign has an Egyptian claimant too. One account connects the khamsa with the Mano Pantea, an amulet Egyptians knew as the Two Fingers, where the two fingers stand for Isis and Osiris and the thumb for their child Horus, invoking a parent's protection over a child. Inference — that is a theory of origin, offered as one among several, and this atlas prints it as a theory.

In Jewish use the hand doubles as the letter shin, first letter of Shaddai, a name of God — one sign carrying two readings at once. It decorates ketubot and Torah pointers. It largely dropped out of Ashkenazi use by the mid-twentieth century and stayed in Sephardi and Mizrahi practice throughout.

cited

Now

Sold everywhere on the Mediterranean rim and online, in silver, in enamel, on phone cases and on keyrings, worn by people with no tie to any of the five naming communities. Whether a mass-produced khamsa is the same object as a Moroccan silversmith's is an argument with named people on both sides; this atlas reports it and does not settle it.

inference