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Anklets Outside India: Egypt, Africa and the Ancient World
The payal is not alone
People in widely separated cultures and periods put metal around the ankle. Some of what they made was extraordinarily heavy; some sounded as the wearer moved; some combined precious materials with forms that may have carried meanings beyond decoration.
This Sits Beside the Totapari Knowledge Series on Anklets
The series itself is six guides on the Indian anklet — what it is, how it is made, how it is worn, and how to choose one. This article is not one of them. It steps outside India to look at what other people did with the same joint, and it is written to be read alongside the first guide rather than in place of it.
The six guides:
- Anklets: Foot Jewellery in Indian Culture: History, Significance, and Modern Styles
- Everyday Silver Anklets
- One Anklet or Two? How to Style Silver Anklets
- How to Wear Black Thread Anklets with Shoes and Sneakers
- Anklets: A Gift She Will Love (And Actually Wear)
- How to Choose the Right Silver Anklet: Fit, Size, Style and Care Guide
Why Look Outside India at All
Because it tells you which parts of the Indian anklet are particularly Indian, and which possibilities appear when very different cultures ornament the ankle.
The payal can feel like a purely Indian invention. It is not.
Ankle ornament turns up in Egypt four thousand years ago, in Nigeria within living memory, and in Bronze Age Thailand. These examples come from very different places and periods. We do not need to assume either a common origin or completely independent invention to compare them.
What follows is four documented objects, and what each one can — and sometimes cannot — tell us.
A note on the pieces. Every object described here is a real one that can be pointed at: an accession number, an excavation, a collector or a date. Nothing in this article is a general impression of what people used to wear.
The Oldest One We Can Put a Name To
Gold and amethyst, with a claw hanging from it, made for a woman we can name, some time between 1887 and 1813 BC.
It was found at Lahun, at the entrance to the Fayum, in the tomb of a royal woman called Sithathoryunet, excavated in 1914. It is about fifteen centimetres long. A small gold claw hangs from it, a little over three centimetres.
Two things about it are worth sitting with.
It is gold, and it is at the foot. In the Indian convention that is close to unthinkable — gold belongs above the waist. Egypt had no such rule, and a king’s daughter went into her tomb wearing gold on her ankle.
And it carries a claw. Not a flower, not a bead. The claw of an animal, made in gold and hung at the ankle.
Claw and feline forms in Egyptian jewellery are often interpreted as protective, and the same interpretation has been applied to this anklet. We could not reach the museum’s own wording to confirm it, so the article describes the claw and leaves its meaning open.
One thing about the construction is certain, and it matters later in this article: the anklet is hinged. It had to be. A closed ring sized to an ankle will not pass a heel.
What the object shows plainly is that precious material and animal imagery could meet in the same ankle ornament.
Anklets Weighing Almost Three Kilograms
A documented pair weighs 2,990 grams. Roughly a kilogram and a half on each leg.
These are ogba, worn by Igbo women of high-ranking families in south-eastern Nigeria into the early twentieth century. They stand up to twelve centimetres tall and measure between twenty-two and thirty-eight centimetres across.
They Were Not Put On. They Were Closed On.
Smiths from Awka, who travelled from town to town to work, cold-beat each one from a T-shaped piece of brass and then hammered it shut around the leg.
After that it did not come off. Not at night, not to wash, not for years.
A missionary who saw them in the early 1900s wrote that from the hour they were fixed on, the wearer could never again stand, sit or lie in a normal position.
What They Did to Walking
A woman wearing them had to swing each leg wide and clear of the other to keep the anklets from striking each other or tripping her.
That walk was not treated as a misfortune. It was read as beauty, and as proof — visible at a distance — that her husband was prosperous enough that she did not need to work.
The wealth was visible not only in the amount of brass worn. It was visible in the way the ornament changed the wearer’s movement.
Marriage Changed the Metal
Unmarried girls wore long spiral coils of brass instead. On marriage those could be exchanged for the heavy form, which was then sometimes worn into middle age.
The surfaces carry geometric and animal designs — snakes, lizards, marks resembling scarification, patterns read as water.
The practice had largely ended by the 1920s.
Hollow, and Rattling
Cast brass, made hollow, and some of them have something loose sealed inside.
Baule anklets are built by lost-wax casting into a curved hollow form, the surface worked all over with incised lines, ridges and half-circles.
A museum record describes them plainly as emblems of status and wealth.
The detail worth noticing is the cavity. Some hollow examples contained rattles, allowing the ornament to produce sound when the wearer moved.
The mechanism is different from the small suspended bells of many Indian anklets, but the result is similar.
Movement at the ankle can turn an ornament into something that is heard as well as seen.
We do not need to claim that the idea was independently invented in the two places. The objects themselves give us the interesting comparison.
Two Children, Centuries Apart
At one prehistoric cemetery in north-east Thailand, two infants were buried with sounding ornaments at the ankle — and they are separated by centuries.
The earlier one is from the Bronze Age. Thirty-six copper-based objects were found from that phase. Most were bells placed at an infant’s ankle; the rest were axes.
The later one is from the Iron Age. A nine-month-old was buried wearing a pair of bronze anklets cast by lost wax and filled with clay balls, so that they sounded like a bell or a rattle.
Different centuries, different technique. Loose bells hung at the ankle in one; in the other, a sealed hollow form with the sound built into the casting.
The adult burials contained large quantities of jewellery too — men and women were buried with as many as forty shell bangles on each arm.
But the children are the ones that stop you.
What we cannot recover with certainty is why. The bells might have had ritual, protective, social or sensory significance. The burial alone does not allow us to choose between those possibilities.
Nor should we assume an infant had nothing to display. Objects placed with a child could express the status, beliefs or identity of the family and the community rather than anything the child had acquired.
What the evidence establishes is simpler, and more interesting: sounding ankle ornaments mattered enough to be made carefully and placed on a very young child.
What India Shares, and What Is Particularly Indian
Put the four objects beside the Indian payal and the overlap is obvious — and so is the difference.
Recurring Features
Weight at the ankle could express wealth and status. Sound could be made by bells, or by material sealed inside a hollow anklet. An ankle ornament could also carry an amuletic dimension.
There is a practical similarity too. The ankle sets a jeweller a peculiar problem: an ornament that fits closely around the ankle cannot pass over the wider heel. Different traditions solve it through openings, hinges, coils, fastenings, or by closing the ornament around the leg.
These similarities do not prove that the anklet had one origin. They do not prove independent invention either.
They show that very different cultures discovered some of the same possibilities — and faced the same practical problem — when ornamenting the same part of the body.
What Becomes Particularly Indian
The first is the strong predominance of silver. The examples here alone show how different the choice of material could be elsewhere: gold and amethyst in Egypt, brass among the Igbo and Baule, bronze bells in Thailand.
The second is India’s extraordinary vocabulary for ankle jewellery — payal, pajeb, nupur, painjan, kolusu, golusu, padasaram, silambu and other regional terms. English largely compresses these into the single word anklet.
And in many Indian communities the anklet and the toe ring came to occupy different positions. Toe rings can carry an explicit association with marriage, while anklets have a broader life and are worn by girls, brides, married women and unmarried women alike.
And One Difference That Matters More Than the Rest
The Egyptian anklet discussed here is an archaeological object. The Igbo practice described here had largely ended by the 1920s. The child at Ban Non Wat was buried thousands of years ago.
India gives us something different to set beside them, because the payal remains part of a large living jewellery tradition. It is still made, sold, gifted and worn.
That does not mean ankle jewellery disappeared everywhere else, and these four examples cannot establish that India is the only culture with an unbroken anklet tradition.
What they do let us see is how rich the Indian tradition remains: silver payal and rigid forms, sounding and silent anklets, bridal and everyday wear, many regional names and constructions, and now the light contemporary anklet.
What makes its story Indian is not that India alone discovered the ankle. It is what India made of it.
Where the Indian story is told in full: Anklets: Foot Jewellery in Indian Culture — the history, the names, the types, why silver, and why the heavy payal became light.
What We Checked
Every object in this article is a catalogued one. This is where each came from, and where we have had to hold back.
Egypt — the claw anklet
Checked and confirmed. Gold and amethyst, Dynasty 12, about 1887 to 1813 BC, roughly fifteen centimetres long with a claw pendant of about three centimetres. Excavated in 1914 from the tomb of Sithathoryunet at Lahun and held under accession 16.1.7a.
Egypt — whether the claw is protective
We tried and could not confirm this. Feline claw forms are widely described as protective, and that reading is commonly applied to this anklet. But the museum’s own object page could not be reached, and every accessible record — including the museum’s own published catalogue of Egyptian jewellery — carries either the basic entry or no mention of the claws at all. We are not willing to attribute an interpretation to a museum that we have not read. The article describes the claw, and the hinged construction, which are both certain.
Nigeria — the weight and the making
Checked and confirmed. A documented pair weighs 2,990 grams together, standing about twelve centimetres tall, with diameters between twenty-two and thirty-eight centimetres. Cold-beaten from a T-shaped piece of brass by itinerant smiths from Awka and fixed around the leg. A pair collected before 1923 is held in a university museum collection under accession 1975.4.1.
Nigeria — whether these are the heaviest ever worn
Reported in one account only. We can document this weight. We cannot establish that no heavier anklet was ever worn anywhere, which would need evidence across every culture and period. The article gives the documented figure rather than claiming a record.
Nigeria — what it did to the body
Checked and confirmed. The account that the wearer could never again stand, sit or lie normally comes from a missionary who observed the practice in the early twentieth century, and is quoted in the museum record, as are the wide swinging gait, the exchange of a girl’s brass coils for the heavier married form, and the decline of the practice by the 1920s. An earlier draft said the anklets made labour impossible. That went beyond the evidence and has been removed.
Côte d’Ivoire — the Baule anklets
Checked and confirmed. Cast brass, late nineteenth to mid twentieth century, hollow, some containing rattles. A national museum record describes them as emblems of status and wealth and notes the incised lines, ridges and concentric semicircles across the surface. What the source does not establish is that the sounding construction was invented independently of every other tradition, and that claim has been removed.
Thailand — the infant burial
Checked and confirmed. Reported in a peer-reviewed archaeological journal, and these are two burials from different phases of the same cemetery, not one. In the Bronze Age phase, most of thirty-six copper-based artefacts were bells at the ankle of an infant, the rest axes. In the Iron Age phase, a nine-month-old was buried with a pair of bronze anklets cast by lost wax and filled with clay balls to sound like a bell or rattle. An earlier draft of this article merged the two into a single burial. The burials tell us the ornaments were placed with the children. They do not tell us why, and the article does not claim otherwise.
Nigeria — where the brass came from
We tried and could not confirm this. It is said that some plain brass blanks were manufactured in Britain and finished in Nigeria. We could not establish this from a source we would rely on, so it stays out of the article.
Common Questions
Short answers on ankle ornament outside India.
Did men wear anklets in other cultures?
Yes. Ancient Egyptian evidence includes ankle ornaments associated with both sexes. But we should be careful about identifying every ring-shaped archaeological ornament as an anklet from appearance alone — archaeological context and placement matter.
What are some of the heaviest documented anklets?
The Igbo ogba of south-eastern Nigeria. One recorded pair weighs 2,990 grams, roughly a kilogram and a half on each leg. They were fixed around the legs and substantially affected the wearer’s movement. Calling them the heaviest anklets ever worn would require evidence across other cultures and periods, so the documented weight is the safer and more useful fact.
Were anklets silver everywhere, as in India?
No. Sithathoryunet’s Egyptian anklet is gold and amethyst; the Igbo and Baule examples are brass; the Ban Non Wat ankle bells are bronze. Silver became particularly important in Indian ankle jewellery, but there is nothing about the ankle itself that requires it.
Did anklets make a sound outside India too?
Yes. Some Baule anklets were hollow and held rattling elements, and at Ban Non Wat a nine-month-old infant was buried wearing bronze anklets filled with clay balls so that they rattled. What we cannot say from these examples is that sounding anklets were invented independently in each place. What we can say is that different traditions made use of the relationship between movement and sound.
Why did anklets survive in India when they died out elsewhere?
That question assumes something the evidence does not establish. The particular historical forms discussed here have entered museum and archaeological collections, but that does not mean ankle jewellery died out in every society outside India. What is securely observable is that India retains a particularly extensive living anklet tradition, with regional names, traditional and contemporary forms, bridal and everyday uses, and an active trade.
