At the end of December 2021, the skeleton of a man with a nail through his heel was found at a Roman archaeological site located just over a hundred kilometers north of London. According to the researchers, this find is the largest evidence to date of a crucifixion, the brutal Roman punishment.
The executioner pierced the prisoner’s right heel and fixed it to a wooden plank. There, the condemned man, who was around thirty, agonized for hours or days until he died of dehydration and suffocation, as his inspiratory muscles ran out of enough energy to allow gas exchange.
Nails, as an invention, arise in the origins of humanity. And it is that our ancestors were the ones who had the need to manufacture a device that could join two wooden surfaces. Its enormous versatility has meant that, despite the time that has elapsed, it still remains an irreplaceable tool, which can be found in fields as diverse as construction, carpentry or blacksmithing.
The first, of bone
Today’s nails are usually made of carbon steel, with a diamond tip, a material very different from that of the original ones, which, quite possibly, were made from animal bones and wood.
The passage from wood to iron must have occurred in the Iron Age and some researchers point out that both the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians already knew and used them regularly 4,000 years ago. In a very short time they must have become essential not only for building wooden houses or small boats but also for making shoes and some handicrafts.
We know that, some time later, the Phoenicians, Egyptians and Greeks used nails with a more spiritual connotation, since with them they fixed their dead to prevent them from returning to the realm of the living.
Later, the naturalist Pliny the Elder, who lived in the first century of our era, describes how at that time those who died due to illness were nailed, since in this way it was thought that the spread of miasms could be avoided.
The Hebrew alphabet is made up of twenty-two letters, each of which is loaded with enormous symbolism. One of them -the letter vav- symbolizes the nail, as an allegory of union. In Kabbalah, the letter vav has the singularity of interrelating the elements of creation and of being able to change the past from the future.
A hundred nails are well worth a penny
For many centuries, iron was heated with carbon to form a dense, spongy mass, which later took the form of square bars that were allowed to cool. After heating the rod in a forge, the blacksmith cut the nail and hammered the four sides, smoothing them. It was then that he inserted the hot piece into a hole and with four hammer blows the head was formed.
It was not until the end of the 16th century that a machine was invented to make nails mechanically, despite the fact that the final finish had to be done by hand and that the head of the nail was usually a piece of it bent at a right angle.
In the 19th century, nails began to be mass-produced and those made by hand gradually declined until they disappeared at the beginning of the following century. At this time that craft has completely disappeared.
To finish one last curiosity, it is thought that the term “penny” was used in medieval England to refer to the price of a hundred nails, which were so valuable that they were often used as barter currency.