The Hamsa is read across the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia as a ward against the evil eye, the belief, documented at length in Frederick Elworthy's survey of the superstition, that an envious or malicious look can cause real harm to a person, animal, object or undertaking without the looker necessarily intending it.
Elworthy's comparative study places the Hamsa's open-palm, eye-marked form within a much wider family of apotropaic devices distributed from the ancient Mediterranean world outward, sharing its underlying logic, an image confronting the harmful gaze, with unrelated devices such as the evil-eye bead, and reflecting a belief documented across a strikingly wide span of unrelated cultures rather than one this atlas can trace to a single point of origin. The specific belief that a look alone, independent of any spoken curse or physical act, can transmit harm is what Elworthy's study treats as the evil eye's defining and most widespread feature, documented from ancient Mediterranean sources through to nineteenth century folk practice recorded across Europe, the Middle East and South Asia, which is why protective devices addressing it recur independently in so many unconnected regional traditions rather than spreading from one single point of origin.