A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [115]
The bronze hand once belonged to a man called Wahab Ta’lab. It is life-size, slightly smaller than my own hand, made of bronze and surprisingly heavy. It’s very lifelike but as it has no arm attached to it, it does look as though it’s been severed. But, according to Jeremy Field, orthopaedic and hand surgeon at Cheltenham General Hospital, this is not the case:
They have done the impression of the veins so carefully, which would probably go against its being some form of amputation. If a hand was amputated the veins would be empty because obviously the blood drains out. These are very carefully crafted and really quite beautiful. I’m sure this is a cast of a human hand, but there are certain things that are slightly odd about it. The nails are spoon-shaped, indicative of someone who might have had anaemia; the fingers are really thin and spindly, and also there is a deformity of the little finger, which I think has probably been broken at some stage.
It is small medical details like these that after 1,700 years of oblivion bring Wahab Ta’lab back to life. I find myself wondering how old he was – the veins on the back of the hand are very prominent – and above all wondering how he broke his little finger. Was it perhaps in battle? It doesn’t look as though it was in the fields – this doesn’t seem like the hand of a labourer. A fortune-teller of course would look at once for the lines on the palm of the hand; but the palm of this hand has been left unworked. There are lines, though, but they are on the back, and they are lines of text, written in an ancient Yemeni language which is linked both to modern Hebrew and to Arabic. The inscription tells us what this object was for and where it was displayed:
Son of Hisam, [the] Yursamite, subject of the Banu Sukhaym, has dedicated for his well-being this his right hand to their patron Ta’lab Riyam in his the god’s shrine dhu-Qabrat in the city of Zafar.
It is a pretty baffling series of names and places, but for historians trying to reconstruct the society and the religion of ancient Yemen almost all you have to go on is inscriptions like this one, and it does contain a great deal of information. When the inscription is teased out by experts, we learn that this bronze hand was dedicated at the temple of the god Ta’lab Riyam in a place called Zafar, high in the Yemeni hills. The owner of the hand, Wahab Ta’lab, tells us that he belongs to a clan and that that clan in turn is part of a larger tribal organization whose god was Ta’lab. So Wahab Ta’lab had obviously been named after his own god, and as a further sign of faith he has dedicated his hand publicly to Ta’lab at the centre of the city of Zafar, where it would have been seen along with other offerings of gold, bronze or alabaster representing human figures, animals, arrows and spear heads. In return for these offerings, the god Ta’lab was expected in general terms to bring good fortune to the donors.
Wahab Ta’lab must have been fairly well established to start with – only a man of real wealth could offer a bronze hand as beautifully made as this. But by the international standards of the day his whole society was wealthy. At the time our hand was made most of south Arabia was effectively one state – a confederation of tribes like Wahab Ta’lab’s, known to historians as the Himyarite kingdom. Many monumental buildings survive along with numerous inscriptions, which are evidence of a rich, sophisticated and in some measure literate society. Yemen at this point was no backwater; it