Part 2

But there are at least some weighty reasons for doubting whether this higher stage was really attained by Palaeolithic man. In North America, which, like other parts of that continent, seems to have received its first human settlers at a comparatively late geological date, a considerable amount of physical conformity is perceptible among the Red Indian tribes. But we are confronted by the significant fact that this racial unity is nevertheless compatible with the existence of a multiplicity of native tongues. It has been observed that the number of known stocks or families of Indian languages in the United States amounts to over three score, differing among themselves ‘as radically as each differs from Hebrew, Chinese, or English’.[13] In each of these linguistic families, again, there are several--sometimes as many as twenty--separate languages, which differ again from each other as much as do the various divisions of the ‘Aryan’ group.

But if the original forefathers of these tribes had brought with them a fully developed articulate speech, is it conceivable that the languages of their descendants should be so radically different? This phenomenon, moreover, is thrown into further relief by the fact that when we turn to the signs and gestures current among the Red Indian tribes we find a large common element.

It may be that the very deficiencies in articulate speech which we may justly assume to have existed during the Reindeer Period gave a spur to other means of personal intercommunication. Not only would the infancy of speech promote the use of gestures, but it may have powerfully contributed towards diffusing the practice of making pictorial records.[14] The possibility, therefore, does not seem to be excluded that men drew before they talked.

Nothing in itself is more baseless than the idea that oral language is necessary for the expression of abstract ideas. The case of deaf-mutes, who without the aid of speech can give expression to the most complicated ideas, affords an example of this in the midst of a civilized society. The study of gesture-language enables us to see how easy and natural is the process by which the expression of abstract ideas grows out of the imitation of concrete objects. Take the very word to ‘grow’. An Indian expresses the notion of a tree by holding the right hand before his body, back forwards, with the fingers spread out--the fingers, as it were, representing branches, and his wrist the trunk; to show that it is high he pushes it slightly upwards. For grass he holds his hand with the fingers upwards in the sense of blades, near the ground. In order to express the general idea ‘to grow’ he begins as in the sign for grass, but instead of keeping his hand near the ground, pushes it upward in an uninterrupted manner.[15] So, too, to express falsehood he places his index and second fingers so that they separate in front of his mouth, in order to indicate a double tongue. For truth he places his index finger only in front, to show, if we may use the expression, that he is ‘single-tongued’.

Root elements of gesture language, which as a means of communication preceded the development of articulate language as opposed to mere emotional cries, seem themselves to be almost universal. And picture-writing--the sister mode of expression--has also, as we see from the example of the American Continent, even in some of its more conventional developments, an immeasurably wider currency than the comparatively recent growths of oral communication. In China, amongst a great variety of mutually unintelligible languages and dialects, the ideographic characters, which are really conventionalized pictures, and independent of oral equivalents, supply to a great extent the place both of gesture and spoken language. The Red Indian world, as we have seen, is a Babel of disconnected languages, but the old sign-language is the same, and the picture-language of one tribe is generally intelligible to another.

The great uniformity of simple gestures in all countries of the world is thus a cause predisposing to a considerable amount of uniformity among the pictorial signs into which this element enters. If we take, for instance, that pathetic monument of picture writing, the well-known rock-painting of the Tule River in California, we see a series of human figures with outstretched hands, signifying, in the American gesture-language, ‘Nothing here.’ Two outstretched arms, by themselves, appear in the sense of negation among the conventionalized Maya pictographs of Yucatan,[16] and the sign reappears in the same abbreviated form, and with the same meaning, among Egyptian hieroglyphs. So, too, the ideograph of a child or son--an infant sucking its thumb--is found alike in ancient Egypt, China, and North America.

Gesture language, in fact, is constantly reacting on the pictographic method of expression, and may be said to supply it with moods and tenses even without the aid of words.

It must, nevertheless, be borne in mind that simple pictography, whether or not aided by gesture language, is one thing. The evolution of a regular script is quite another matter.

A conventionalized system of writing can only be thought of in connexion with a highly developed articulate speech. And this was certainly the achievement of a later world than that of these old Palaeolithic hunters. The physical condition now changes. The characteristic fauna of the Reindeer Period disappears, and with it the remarkable race to whom were due the first known products of high art. The close of the Pleistocene Age and the beginning of the New Era is marked in France by a curious deposit in the Cave of Mas d’Azil, on the left bank of the Arize, in which its explorer, M. Piette, found a number of flat oblong pebbles marked with red stripes and simple figures by means of peroxide of iron.[17] M. Piette has endeavoured to trace in some of these a definite system of numeration by means of lines and circles, and even particular signs for a thousand, ten thousand, and a million. That some of these represent simple numerical markings is possible, but beyond this point it is impossible to follow M. Piette. Among the other markings are several, sometimes repeated on the same pebble, of curiously alphabetiform aspect. Among these are signs resembling our E, F, and L, a Gothic M, the Greek _Theta_, _Gamma_, _Epsilon_, _Xi_ and _Sigma_, the Phoenician _Cheth_, and some terms that occur in the Minoan and Cypriote series.

The occurrence of this series of geometrical marks must be regarded as another proof of how early such alphabetic prototypes originated. The Mas d’Azil series has no particular connexion with the linear signs associated with the handiwork of the Reindeer Period. Their meaning is obscure. Some may be degraded pictographs, often perhaps of animals or their parts, with a traditional meaning attached to them. Some may be of purely individual and arbitrary invention. The numbers on the pebbles have suggested the view that they may have served for games. On the other hand, it is by no means improbable that the figures had a magic value, and Mr. A. B. Cook[18] has called attention to the parallel presented by the Australian deposits of pebbles called _Churingas_, connected with the departed spirits of a tribe, and having designs of a totemic character. It is certain that the people who produced these coloured pebbles were in a rude state of barbarism far below the gifted race who had preceded them in the same sheltering cavern. Few will probably be able to follow M. Piette in discerning in these rudely executed marks actual letters--at any rate with a syllabic value--and the true ancestors of the Greek and Phoenician alphabets, or in regarding the Cave of Mas d’Azil ‘as one vast school where the scholars learnt to read, to reckon, to write, and to know the religious symbols of the solar god’.

The deposit of Mas d’Azil containing the coloured pebbles belongs already to the modern world, the fauna associated with it all belonging to existing species inhabiting the temperate regions. The rude culture then exhibited heralds the beginning of the Neolithic Period. This later Stone Age is not characterized by any of the artistic genius displayed by the men of the Reindeer Period. Figured representations are now rare. The caves, moreover, which preserved the earlier records, were now used more for sepulture than habitation. Yet the analogy of all primitive races at the present day shows that it would be a mistake to suppose that, though the act may have been rude, the practice of picture-writing was not still universally in vogue throughout the European area. We have to bear in mind how many of such records are consigned to perishable materials--such as bark or hides, or in the case of tattooing the human body itself.

During the later prehistoric times, and notably during the Early Metal Age, many abiding records, in the shape of rock-sculptures, paintings, and engravings, and at times graffiti on pottery, are found diffused throughout the whole of our Continent and the adjoining Mediterranean area; and in outlying regions, such as Lapland, the practice of picture-writing can be traced down to modern times.

Though a large amount of isolated materials exists on this subject, the evidence, so far as I am aware, has never been put together in a systematic manner. Yet it seems possible that, by means of a due co-ordination of the materials and the application of the comparative method, the European area may eventually be divided into distinct zones or provinces, each characterized by its certain typical pictographic feature. Primitive lines of intercommunication may with great probability be made out, and evidences of early racial extension come to light by this method of investigation.

It is interesting to observe that it is in the extreme north of Europe, where the conditions most approach those of the Reindeer Period, that purely pictographic methods have remained the longest. The Lapp troll drums, used as a means of divination by the native shamans, show a variety of linear figures and symbols which had a traditional interpretation. Thus in the simple example given in Fig. 9, taken from Scheffer’s _Lapponia_,[19] we see, in the upper compartment, according to the interpretation preserved by Scheffer, four Lapp gods, with rayed heads, one of them identified with the Norsk Thor, above which are the crescent moon, twelve stars, indicated by crossed lines, and seven flying birds--resembling the simplification of the same figures seen in the Cretan linear script.

On another base are three more sacred figures with rayed heads, signifying Christ and two apostles, taken into the Lapp Pantheon at a somewhat lower level. The centre of this compartment is occupied by the sun, and about the field are depicted a reindeer, wolf, bear, ox, fox, squirrel, and snake. To the right are three wavy lines representing a lake and exactly reproducing the Egyptian hieroglyph of ‘water’.

Fig. 10 shows a more elaborate example,[20] of which the interpretation has not been supplied. The variation of gesture displayed, somewhat rudely it is true, by the various figures on this drum illustrates the intimate and ever-recurring connexion between pictography and gesture-language.

These Lapp troll drums must have been generally in use till the end of the seventeenth century. It was not, indeed, till the middle of the succeeding century that Christianity took a real hold on the population. That there has been a considerable survival of surreptitious heathenism among the Lapps, I myself was able to ascertain during two journeys undertaken with that object through Finnish and Russian Lapland in 1874, and again in 1876. It was specially interesting to observe that some of the traditional figures seen on the old troll drums are still engraved on the reindeer-horn spoons of that region.

The troll drums of the Lapps find their analogy in those of the kindred Samojed tribes to the East, which present figures of the same class. But the pictographs on these will be found to fit on to the rock-carvings or petroglyphs of Siberia, first described by Strahlenberg, of which a specimen is given in Fig. 12.[21] Similar rock carvings may be traced through a vast Finno-Ugrian or Mongolian region to the borders of China, and the Chinese characters themselves must have arisen from a branch of the same great Northern family.

This Finno-Tataric province of primitive pictography touches the Atlantic in Northern Norway. In the south of the Scandinavian Peninsula we have numerous examples of picture-writing in the shape of carving,[22] mainly belonging to the Bronze Age, either on rocks or on the slabs of sepulchral barrows. Of the latter class are the well-known examples from the Cairn of Kivik, on the east coast of Scania, and the rock-carvings extend through Southern Norway and Denmark. The most remarkable of all are probably those of Bohuslan, of which an example, in which ships figure largely, is shown in Fig. 13.[23]

In our own islands there is also evidence during the Bronze Age of the practice of engraving signs and pictographic figures on rocks and the slabs of sepulchral cists and chambers. Those found in England and Scotland consist for the most part of mere geometrical figures, such as concentric circles with connecting lines, the more elaborate figures found in the Fife Caves,[24] for example, certainly belonging to the Late Celtic Period. But in Ireland, then raised, by its abundant output of gold, to the position of a Western Eldorado, the field of primitive pictography is richer. The slabs of the chambered tumuli of Sleive-na-Calligha present groups of elaborate figures;[25] but a special interest attaches to those discernible in the great chambered barrow of New Grange. As was pointed out by Mr. Coffey,[26] one of the principal figures here carved represents in a degraded form a ship with its crew analogous to those so constantly repeated in the Scandinavian group (Fig. 14). This coincidence becomes the more suggestive when we recall the existence of a whole series of finds showing a connexion between Ireland and Denmark and its neighbour-lands during the Bronze Age.

These parallels extend to Brittany. The rocks and sepulchral slabs of the old Armoric region also present, as is well known, a considerable pictographic material, dating from Neolithic and Early Metal Ages. Among recently discovered remains of this class may be mentioned a group of curious inscribed rocks near Saint-Aubin in Vendée,[27] the carvings on which seem to show some analogy with the menhirs of the Aveyron, the dolmens of the Gard, and the caves of the Marne. On these, besides conventionalized linear figures of men and animals, occur a variety of unexplained signs, some of them of a remarkably alphabetiform character.

It is among the sculptured slabs of the Morbihan dolmens that we find the immediate pendant to the ship signs of Ireland and Scandinavia. On slabs of the chambered barrow of Manné Lud, near Locmariaker, there appears--beside stone axes, hafted and unhafted, and other figures--what is evidently the same ship sign as that of New Grange, in various stages of degeneration, finally resulting in simple crescents with recurved ends (Fig. 16).[28] It is true that the associations of these Breton dolmens end with the close of the Neolithic period, but the archaeological evidence shows that this was overlapped by the Early Metal Age of Ireland.

South of the Pyrenees similar records of primitive pictography largely associated again in this case with the builders of dolmens and chambered barrows extend through a large part of the Iberian Peninsula. Some stir was recently made by the reported discovery of characters on the slabs and content of certain Portuguese dolmens of Traz-os-Montes,[29] which were supposed to constitute a kind of alphabet or syllabary. The accounts of these discoveries, however, lack scientific precision, and though many of the characters found are certainly of alphabetiform type, there can be no doubt that these, together with the rude zoomorphic figures with which they are associated, belong to a much simpler stage of graphic expression.

In the south of Spain the chain of evidence is continued by the ‘Written Stones’ of Andalusia. The signs here are often painted in red, in a rude manner, on the slabs of megalithic structures, such as the Piedra Escrita near Fuencaliente,[30] (Figs. 17, 18). The signs include a variety of men and animals, symbols of the heavenly bodies, trees, arms, and implements, and other objects. Amongst some curious analogies that they present with the contemporary pictographs of Northern and North-Western Europe, may be noticed certain figures that resemble linear degenerations of the Ship and Crew sign (see Fig. 17).

The Andalusian pictographs find their continuation beyond the straits in another widely diffused group of ‘Written Stones’, the _Hadjrat Mektoubat_[31] of the Arabs, extending through Algeria and Morocco into the Saharan region and along the Atlantic littoral to the Canaries.[32]

To return to the European shores of the Mediterranean, a remarkable group of prehistoric rock-carvings already known in mediaeval times as the Maraviglie, or ‘Marivels’,[33] is found near the Col di Tenda in the Maritime Alps--in the neighbourhood, that is, of a very old line of communication between Provence and the Po Valley. The earliest known groups of these figures lay at an elevation of between 7,000 and 8,000 feet about the Laghi delle Maraviglie, in the heart of Monte Bego.[34] More recently a still more extensive series has been discovered by Mr. Clarence Bicknell, cut like the others in the glaciated schist rocks and at a similar lofty elevation in the neighbouring Val di Fontanalba.[35] I have myself visited a more outlying group at Orco Feglino[36] in the Finalese, only a few miles from the Ligurian coast.

These figures, of which examples are given in Figs. 19 and 20, represent oxen, often engaged in ploughing, and men in various positions, sometimes brandishing weapons and apparently signalling, and a variety of arms, implements, and other objects. Among the weapons, the halberds and daggers are characteristic of the earlier part of the Bronze Age,[37] and it is noteworthy that the sword which characterized the later phase of that culture is entirely absent. The figures of the oxen ploughing are depicted as if seen from above--a circumstance explained by the way in which these rock terraces look down on the cultivated lands below.[38] Many of these oxen are conventionalized to such an extent that they have rather the appearance of rude figures of scorpions or beetles with tails.

The same figures are often repeated in the schist slopes, and we have not here such connected groups as we see, for instance, on the sculptured slabs of Scandinavia. The picture-signs of the Maraviglie had perhaps a votive intention. It seems to me that some of the figures may represent packs, and that merchants as well as warriors and tillers of the soil took part in their representations.

The records of primitive pictography extend to the Vosges and Jura, and reappear east of the Adriatic. In a fiord of the Bocche di Cattaro, not far from the site of Rhisinium, the capital of the old Illyrian kingdom, my own explorations were rewarded by the discovery of a curious group of painted signs on a rock-face above a sacred grotto, and in a somewhat inaccessible position. They consisted mainly of animals and varieties of the swastika sign. That they were of pre-Christian date may be regarded as certain, but a fuller investigation of them at my own hands was cut short by _force majeure_.

Up to the present the old pictography of the lands between the Adriatic and the Black Sea and the lower Danubian basin is best illustrated by the linear incised figures found on the primitive pottery of that region. The best collection of such signs is due to the researches of Fräulein Torma, at Broos, in Transylvania. In view of the ethnic and archaeological connexions which are shown to have existed between the lower Danubian regions and the western part of Asia, it is specially interesting to note the analogies that these Transylvanian graffiti present with those noted by Schliemann on the whorls and pottery of Hissarlik (Fig. 21).[39] Both groups, moreover, belong approximately to the same epoch, marked by the transition from the Neolithic to the Early Metal Age.

That many of these signs are linearistic degenerations of animal and other figures is clear, and such figures may be reasonably considered to have an ideographic sense. But from this to investing the marks on a primitive whorl or pot with a definite phonetic value, and proceeding to read them off by the aid of the Cypriote syllabary of the Greek language as it existed some two thousand years later, can only be described as a far cry. Linearized signs of altogether alphabetic appearance belong, as already shown, to the very beginnings of human culture. In the case of the whorls, moreover, many of the linear figures are really repetitions of similar marks due to the decay of a border pattern--a phenomenon already paralleled by some of the engraved groups of the Reindeer Period. A recurring decorative fragment of this kind somewhat resembles, according to the progressive stages of its decadence, the Cypriote _go_, _ti_, or _re_--a circumstance productive of readings by eminent scholars[40] containing vain repetitions of _go go_, _ti ti_, and _re re_.

If we turn to Crete, the source of the developed pre-Phoenician scripts of Greece and the Aegean world, we find evidence of the same primitive stratum of linearized pictography. But the true hieroglyphic script, in which the phonetic element is apparently already present, in addition to the ideographic, displays other features which lie beyond the scope of our present theme. In the advanced linear scripts which grow out of this, and which certainly have a largely phonetic basis, we mark a regularity of arrangement and a definite setting forth of word-groups altogether different from the phenomena presented by the elemental figures of primitive pictography. The Phoenician and later Greek alphabet carries us a step further.

But the conventionalized pictography of Crete, if it does not give us the actual source of the later Phoenician letters, at least supplies the best illustration of the elements out of which it was evolved. And it will be seen, from what has been already said, that the more primitive field of pictography, out of which this conventionalized Cretan system arose, is itself only a branch of a widely diffused European family of picture-writing, of which the records can be traced from Lapland to the Straits of Gibraltar, and from the Atlantic to the Aegean, and which finds again its continuation on the African and the Asiatic side.