Did you know that? The nail is a symbol... Yes, but of what?

You knew that the nail is used to hang pictures on the wall or, for the older fans of Ulysses 31, that it is the favorite menu of Nono... But did you know that the nail has its own symbolism?

Nono in its nails, author unknown

Indeed, it represents, and it is quite obvious, fixity. When the ancients built a sacred building, they always began by planting an imposing nail to symbolically signify that the place is centered, fixed.

It comes from the Latin clavus, which originally meant, as clavis, a pin, first of wood and then of iron, which was passed through a ring to close a door or which was used to secure different elements. But from ancient times, the nail was also used symbolically in Rome to mark the years: every year, at the ides of September, a large nail, the clavus annalis, was driven into a wall of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. It was thought that this rite was prior to the widespread use of writing.

Nail in a wall, the symbol of nail, © Canva, free use

In the same way, in case of calamity, a clavus sacer, a "sacred nail", was planted in this same temple, according to a custom that, shortly after the capture of Rome by the Gauls in 390 BC, when a plague had ravaged the city and the disappearance of the Roman people was feared, a dictator had put a nail in this temple and had thus stopped the epidemic. A dictator clavi fingendi causa, a "dictator in charge of driving the nail", was then immediately appointed to carry out this task and stop the evils.

Cuneiform writing, author Zunkir © public domain public

Finally, you have probably heard of the cuneiform writing, also called cludiform: it is the writing of the ancient texts of Mesopotamia (Sumer and Akkad, Babylonia, Assyria), Persia, Susiana, Media, Armenia, etc.. It is composed of figures of corners or nails, or more exactly of arrowheads, variously grouped and combined with the figure of an angle, a chevron, or perhaps a bow. How can we not make the link with the role of writing which, here even more so with its nails, symbolically fixes the sounds of words?