The Tuareg stone armring

A ring taken with the sword

The French explorer Henri Duveyrier wrote in 1864 that every Tuareg man except the marabouts (Muslim holy men) wore a stone ring on his right upper arm from the age when he could take up arms, and never took it off. Its purpose, the Tuareg told him, was to give the arm more strength for a sword stroke. He described the rings as green serpentine. In 1930 the anthropologist C. G. Seligman wrote that at 16 or 17 Tuareg youths began to carry a sword and wear the stone arm-rings, and were then counted full members of their tribe or village.

To verify: The page number of Duveyrier’s section on the stone ring: the scanned contents and page headings disagree.

“It gives the wearer courage”

Writing in 1935 and citing the traveller F. R. Rodd, W. D. Hambly said that in the Aïr mountains the rings were first worn when a young man took up the sword, that boys and women were not allowed to wear them, and that the flat rings passed from father to son; some bore a name in Tifinagh, the Tuareg script. The Horniman Museum in London holds a black stone ring from Agadez, dated only “before December 2005”, of the kind worn just above the elbow. Its record says that Ursel Widemann, who collected it, was told that the ring “does not function as an amulet, but gives the wearer courage, i.e. it is more a psychological aid”.

To verify: Hambly is reporting F. R. Rodd’s book People of the Veil (1926), p. 285, which we have not read ourselves.; Who told Ursel Widemann that the ring gives courage, and when: the museum record does not say.

Weapon, ornament or courage

Not everyone thought the ring was for fighting. The ethnographers Henri Lhote (1944) and Johannes Nicolaisen (1963) judged the stone too fragile to serve as a weapon and treated the ring as an ornament. The Horniman’s notes on another Tuareg armlet say that such armlets were given to young men with a sword at a rite of passage, and that stone armlets are very rare nowadays. We tell the ring’s story and make no promise to anyone who wears one: the courage is the wearer’s own.