Amulet AtlasLong reads
The eye across four continents, the fake market, and who a charm in a case belongs to.
Essay (10)
1 CE to now
Two words, one tray of objects, and no agreement about which word goes on which object. Some writers cut the pair by direction — an amulet turns harm away, a talisman…
2026 CE to now
The timeline on this site is drawn from one field. Every record may carry a `dating` block with a start year, an end year, a flag saying whether people still carry the…
2040 BCE to now
Somewhere in every general account of amulets sits a sentence saying that the largest single class of them, anywhere in the world, is protection for infants: the cradle…
2015 CE to now
A charm you cannot hold raises every question this atlas asks of a bead, and a few the bead never had to answer.
2130 BCE – 1991 CE
A whole class of amulet was never meant to be seen again. It goes up a chimney, under a floor, above a ceiling, into a roof void, beside a door frame, or into a pit cut…
3000 BCE to now
An eye is drawn, moulded, beaded or painted on protective objects from the Tigris to Tijuana, and the temptation is to call that a single human idea. It is not one thing.
1800 CE to now
Buyers at an amulet stall arrive with jeweller's loupes. They are not checking whether the clay is old — the clay is usually old enough.
1871 CE to now
One shape carries two meanings that cannot be blended and must not be confused.
1999 CE to now
Open the map and one continent is close to empty. Australia has one of the longest continuous records of protective objects anywhere, and this atlas prints almost none…
1976 CE to now
A museum drawer of amulets is the hardest kind of collection to hand back and the easiest kind to have taken.
Resources (1)
2026 CE to now
This is the licence explained to the person who wants to take something. The records and the pages built from them are under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. The code…