Part 17

An interesting example of the transformation of a symbol into an emblem is found in the case of the triskele or triquetra. This is now recognised to be a variant of the tetraskele, fylfot, gammadion, or swastika, as it is variously called. Originally this was a sun-symbol, but many other meanings were doubtless associated with it. The triskelion “first appears on the coins of Lycia, about B.C. 480; and then on those of Sicily, where it was adopted by Agathocles, B.C. 317-307, but not as a symbol of the morning, mid-day, and afternoon sun (‘the Three Steps of Vishnu’), but of the ‘three-sided’ or rather ‘three-ended’ or ‘three-pointed’ (triquetrous) land of Trin-akria, _i.e._, ‘Three-Capes,’ the ancient name of Sicily; and finally, from the seventeenth century, on the coins of the Isle of Man;”[119] where covered with chain armour, but without spurs, it was introduced by Alexander III. of Scotland in 1266, when that prince took over the island from the Norwegians; he having become familiar with the device at the English Court of Henry III. (1216-72), whose son Edmund was for a short time styled King of Sicily, and who quartered the Sicilian arms with the royal arms of England.[120] The triquetra is also met with in the armorial bearings of several noble families in England, Germany, Switzerland, and Poland, but now the legs are appropriately clothed in armour and spurs are added; probably these are relics of the Crusades. Truly “the Three Legs of Man” have run afar not only in historical time and geographical space, but also in the unseen world of symbolism.

[119] J. Newton, _Athenæum_, No. 3385, September 10, 1892, p. 353; and for further details cf. _Manx Note-Book_, January 1886.

[120] Sir George Birdwood, Introduction to Count Goblet d’Alviella’s _The Migration of Symbols_.

In the section devoted to Religion I deal with the history and migration of the fylfot, one of the most widely distributed symbols, as this particular instance forms a good example of the method which should be adopted in studying symbols and their meaning.

Pictography is so obvious a means for conveying information that there is no difficulty in supposing it to have originated independently among different peoples. Its use is, and has been, very widely spread.

Petroglyphs are known from great antiquity in Europe and Asia. They are still employed in Australia; they are found in New Zealand, but most of these, like many of those which scattered throughout the continent of Australia, are comparatively ancient. They are common in some parts of South Africa, where they are due to the artistic impulses of the Bushmen; neither the Kafirs nor the Hottentots paint human and animal forms on the rocks. As petroglyphs are much more permanent than pictographs on more perishable materials, they are more likely to be preserved from ancient times, but it is probable that the latter were actually of more frequent occurrence.

There is no single system of pictography. Everywhere a figure of a man means a man, and that of a tree stands for a tree, and to this extent pictographs can be deciphered by any one. More precise information can be gleaned when the figures are provided with some unmistakable determinative, and are in a realistic attitude. In the vast majority of cases a native interpreter is required to explain the exact significance of the figures, or of the event which they commemorate. Once explained, the representations are usually found to be sufficiently appropriate. Although the meaning of simple pictographs may be guessed at readily enough, the elucidation of complex representations is a very different matter, as there are usually some signs, symbols, or determinatives of which the significance is unknown.

In attempting to decipher pictographs, not only is it necessary to have a thorough knowledge of the people who made them, but it must be borne in mind that characters substantially the same, or “homomorphs” (to use Colonel Mallery’s term) made by one set of people, have a different signification among others. Further, differing forms (“symmorphs”) for the same general conception or idea may occur. It is usually comparatively easy for any one to get a meaning out of a pictograph; but it is quite a different matter whether that was the meaning which the inscriber intended to convey.

I have dwelt at some length on pictographs, or ideograms, as they are used to so large an extent by backward peoples to convey ideas; but this is only the threshold of a much larger and more important matter, the Art of Writing.

These early steps, as has already been mentioned, have been traversed by various peoples, but fewer have attained the next stage, while the last has proved a laborious and tedious effort. “To invent and to bring to perfection the score or so of handy symbols for the expression of spoken sounds which we call our alphabet, has proved to be the most arduous enterprise on which the human intellect has ever been engaged. Its achievement tasked the genius of the three most gifted races of the ancient world. It was begun by the Egyptians, continued by the Semites, and finally perfected by the Greeks. From certain Egyptian hieroglyphic pictures, which were in use long before the Pyramids were erected, it is possible to deduce the actual outlines of almost every letter of our modern English alphabet.”[121]

[121] Isaac Taylor, _The Alphabet, an Account of the Origin and Development of Letters_, 1883.

The stages through which alphabetic writing has passed are as follow:—

1. _Pictographs._—Pictures or actual representations of objects. 2. _Ideograms._—Pictorial symbols, which are used to suggest objects or abstract ideas. _Phonograms._—Graphic symbols of sounds. They have usually arisen out of conventionalised ideograms, which have been taken to represent sounds instead of things. 3. (_A._) Verbal signs, representing entire words. 4. (_B._) Syllabic signs which stand for the articulations of which words are composed. 5. _Alphabetic Signs_ or _Letters_, which represent the elementary sounds into which the syllable can be resolved.

1. The least advanced of men can convey information, that is, they can write by means of _Pictographs_.

2. Probably all of them also employ more or fewer symbols or _Ideograms_, such as the depicting of a turtle for “land” by the North American Indians.

The next stage is that in which from pictures which represent things or ideas were derived pictures which represent sounds or _Phonograms_.

Our children, of their own initiative, to amuse themselves, pass through the two earlier stages of writing. The stage we are now considering is a common amusement for children, in the kind of conundrum known as the _rebus_. “In the _rebus_ the picture of an object is taken to denote any word or part of a word which has the same sound as the name of the thing pictured. As in the well-known _rebus_ in which the sentence, ‘I saw a boy swallow a gooseberry,’ is represented by pictures of an eye, a saw, a boy, a swallow, a goose, and a berry. If, for instance, like the ancient Egyptians, we were to adopt a circle with a central dot as our ordinary written symbol for the sun, this would be an ideogram. But if we were to go on, and after the Egyptian or Chinese method, were to use the same symbol to express also the word ‘son,’ we should have a phonogram of that primitive type which has repeatedly served to bridge over the gap between picture ideograms and phonetic characters.”

3. In all languages there are certain monosyllabic words which are pronounced alike, but which have different significations, for example, stork, stalk (noun and verb). In order to indicate which was intended in phonography, it would be necessary to add a determinative or explanatory ideogram. Thus, if a figure of the bird represented the first, the same figure of a bird with a flower or some leaves by its side would indicate a stalk, and a pair of legs by the side of another bird would determinate the action of stalking. The Chinese to the present day write in this cumbrous way, as used to do the ancient Egyptians and Assyrians.

There is no need, however, to invent a _rebus_ to show what one is when Egyptian hieroglyphics are full of them. I take the following from Dr. Isaac Taylor. The picture of a lute was used symbolically by the Egyptian scribes to denote “excellence.” It then came to stand as a phonogram to express the word _nefer_, “good.” But in the Egyptian language this sound represented two homophonic [similarly pronounced] words, _nefer_, “good,” and _nefer_, “as far as.” Hence we find that the character may be used as a pictorial ideogram [pictograph] to represent a lute, and as a symbolic ideogram to mean excellence; then as a phonogram for the preposition _nefer_, and lastly as a syllabic sign to denote _ne_, the first syllable of the word _nefer_.

4. The problem of phonetic denotation having thus been solved, the syllabic signs were combined so as to form compound phonograms on the principle of the _rebus_. For example, the name of lapis lazuli was _khesteb_. Now the word _khesf_ meant to “stop,” and the syllable _teb_ denoted a “pig.” Hence the _rebus_ “stop-pig” was invented to express graphically the name of lapis lazuli, and this is figured by the picture of a man stopping a pig by pulling at its tail.

The Japanese system of writing illustrates the later development. They learnt the art of writing from the Chinese, but as their language is polysyllabic, while the Chinese is essentially monosyllabic, “the Chinese characters which are verbal phonograms could only be used for the expression of the polysyllabic Japanese words by being treated as syllabic signs. A number of characters sufficient to constitute a syllabary having been selected from the numerous Chinese verbal phonograms, it was found that the whole apparatus of determinatives (or ‘keys,’ radicals, or ‘primitives,’ as they are termed in describing Chinese writing) might be rejected, being no longer indispensable to the reader. By these two changes an almost incredible simplification of the Chinese writing was effected. But though syllabism is a great advance on a system of verbal phonograms, yet it is necessarily somewhat cumbrous, owing to the considerable number of characters which are required.”

Although the Japanese have invented one of the best syllabaries which has ever been constructed, the development stopped short there. “The fact that during more than a thousand years it should never have occurred to a people so ingenious and inventive as the Japanese to develop their syllabary into an alphabet, may suffice to show that the discovery of the alphabetic principle of writing is not such an easy or obvious a matter as might be supposed.”

5. The final step consists in employing a sign to represent a sound. It is a more refined analysis of a word, and this gives simple phonetic elements, few in number, but which can be indefinitely combined.

The ancient Egyptians curiously just stopped short of the final stage; they developed alphabetical signs more than four thousand years B.C., but failed to make independent use of them. Their innate conservatism appeared to paralyse further growth; truly the gods have not given all the gifts to any one man, for they (like Hannibal) did not know how to make use of their victory. When a word was alphabetically written a phonogram was added to explain it, and an ideogram (or pictograph) was added to explain the phonogram. The word as finally written was an accretion of various stages in its own evolution.

Those who would like to trace the processes by which one alphabet has been developed must be referred to Dr. Taylor’s great work, from which I have abstracted so much.

For the sake of convenience Egyptian scribes developed a hieratic writing from the hieroglyphics. Strangely enough this was twice accomplished, the early Hieratic was truly cursive and much bolder than the later and more delicate, though less modified Hieratic. The former was invented before the period of the Hyskos or Shepherd Kings, and the latter, or Theban Hieratic, arose in the succeeding Ramesidan dynasty.

The Semites, who dwelt in the Delta of Lower Egypt during the five or six centuries of the Hyskos dynasty, seized on the alphabetic symbols of the cursive Hieratic, which was the secular writings as opposed to the sacred hieroglyphs. Their language and mode of thought being different from that of the Egyptian scribe, and having no sacred traditions to hamper them, they were able to break away from the trammels of antiquity. They were wise enough to drop the useless lumber of the phonogram and ideogram, and so they dissected out, as it were, the alphabet from the cursive Hieratic. This was done in order to have a ready and simple method for recording business transactions. Along with their wares the Phœnicians distributed along the shores of the Mediterranean this far more valuable acquisition. The gift of the knowledge of letters with its vast potentialities more than counterbalanced the sharp practices of these keen traders.

It was reserved for yet another people, the Greeks, to perfect the alphabet they had learnt from the Phœnicians to an extent which the Semites were unable to accomplish, and this improvement in notation enabled them to register thoughts more ennobling than the records of commerce. It is scarcely conceivable that Greece could have risen to her intellectual pre-eminence if she had been shackled with phonographic writing. Evolution in notation is necessary for the evolution of mental processes.

The evolution of the art of writing clearly shows that it was expedient for the utilitarian to destroy the æsthetic, for it must be admitted that the hieroglyphics of Ancient Egypt were the most decorative of all known writing symbols. Professor Flinders Petrie, in a lecture delivered at the Royal Institute, in May 1894, stated that “the Egyptian treatment of everything was essentially decorative; the love of form and drawing was in Egypt a greater force than amongst any other ancient people. Babylon and China, from want of sufficient artistic taste, allowed their pictorial writing to sink into a mere string of debased and conventional forms; the Egyptians, on the contrary, preserve the purely pictorial and artistic character of their hieroglyphs to the end. The hieroglyphs were a decoration in themselves; their very position in the sentence was subordinated to the decorative effect; the Egyptian could not be guilty of the barbarism seen on some of the Assyrian sculpture, where inscriptions were scrawled right across the work without regard to design. So far was this idea carried that many words or ideas were represented by two distinct characters, one wide and the other narrow and deep, so that the harmony of the design should not be broken by an unsuitable element. The result was that the Egyptians were rewarded by having the most beautiful writing in the world.”[122] The less the picture became like what it was intended to represent the more useful it became as a means for conveying thought. But in the new-found method of expression æsthetics has vastly gained, and from our present point of view we may regard as the final term of the series, vivid written descriptions of scenes and events or word-pictures.

[122] Newspaper Report.

III. WEALTH.

When dealing with the decorative transformation of artificial objects I referred (p. 78) to the large axes which are made in some of the islands in the archipelagoes off the south-east peninsula of New Guinea, and I pointed out how the desire for a reputation for wealth appears to have resulted in the production of a useless article, which took a great deal of time to fabricate.

Mr. H. Balfour[123] gives a parallel example in the case of “the development of our own civic and state maces. In these the end which was originally the handle end has now become the ‘clubbed’ end, through the small crown, which originally embellished the handle, having gradually developed into the enormous head so characteristic of the modern ceremonial mace; the two ends have changed places, and the sometime ‘business’ end is now the smaller.”

[123] H. Balfour, _The Evolution of Decorative Art_, 1893, p. 73.

An analogous modification often occurs in votive objects. In prehistoric as well as in recent times objects are dedicated to certain shrines. Sometimes these may be objects in actual use, but frequently they are specially made, and in order to increase their value they are made in some more precious material or with more elaborate workmanship. For example, votive axes have the blade decorated and even often perforated, so that it comes to be an elegant fretwork axe-blade, artistic and valuable but utterly useless for material purposes. This has happened amongst many peoples and at various times.

But there is also a reverse process which operates in votive offerings, which may partly be due to the idea that the deities or powers to whom the offerings are made care more for the idea of offering than for the object offered, as at a later stage it was recognised that “to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams” (1 Samuel xv. 22). It must, however, be confessed that another consideration has probably been operative, and that is economy, and it is conceivable that this motive has led to the reason being assigned that the idea of the gift, or the essence of the gift, was all that was necessary.

It is superfluous to detail many examples, as the following will suffice to illustrate this retrograde tendency. It was formerly a widely-spread custom to sacrifice attendants for the dead. “In the seventeenth century the practice is described as prevailing in Japan, where, on the death of a nobleman, from ten to thirty of his servants put themselves to death. The Japanese form of modern survival of such funeral sacrifices is the substitute for real men and animals, images of stone, or clay, or wood, placed by the corpse.[124] The ceremonies (in China) of providing sedan-bearers and an umbrella-bearer for the dead, and sending mounted horsemen to announce beforehand his arrival to the authorities of Hades, although these bearers and messengers are only made of paper and burnt, seem to represent survivals of a more murderous reality.”[125] The Chinese, too, on certain occasions make mock money in paper and then burn it as an offering.

[124] E. B. Taylor, _Primitive Culture_ (2nd ed.), 1873, p. 463.

[125] _Loc. cit._, p. 464.

Associated with wealth is the evolution of money. Money is essentially a symbol of value; coin is always of less intrinsic worth than its nominal value, and as money transactions increase the nominal value bears absolutely no relation to the real value, as in the case of paper money.

In some parts of British New Guinea we find at the present time a very interesting intermediate stage between mere barter and the evolution of money.

I have elsewhere[126] pointed out that there is no money in Torres Straits; but certain articles have acquired a generally recognised exchange value. Some of the objects necessitate a considerable amount of skilled labour; others, such as certain shell ornaments, vary in value according to the size of the shell, although, of course, the labour in fabricating a small shell is very little less than that expended over a large one. I noticed that, as with our precious stones, a comparatively small increase in size greatly enhances the value. In the first case it is the labour that gives the value, in the second it is the rarity. Thus these objects cannot be regarded as money as they have an intrinsic value. Those most generally employed are the _dibidibi_, a round polished disc worn on the chest, and formed from the apex of a large cone shell (_Conus millepunctatus_); the _waiwi_ or _wauri_, a shell armlet formed of a transverse section of the same shell; a _wap_ or dugong harpoon, a long elegantly shaped instrument cut out of a tree; a canoe.

[126] A. C. Haddon, “The Ethnography of the Western Tribe of Torres Straits,” _Jour. Anth. Inst._, xix., 1890.

A good _waiwi_, one which can be worn on the arm of a man, is a very valued possession, the exchange value is a canoe or a dugong harpoon. I gathered that ten or twelve _dibidibi_ are considered of equal value to any of the above. The ornaments vary in size and finish, and the value varies correspondingly, thus no table of equable exchange can be drawn up.

A wife was formerly rated at the highest unit of exchange, her value being a canoe, or a _wap_, or a _waiwi_.

Macgillivray[127] states that in 1849 an iron knife or a glass bottle (which, when broken into fragments form so many knives) was considered a sufficient price for a wife. Now the natives usually give trade articles to their prospective parents-in-law. My friend Maino, the chief of Tud, informed me that he paid for his wife, who came from the mainland of New Guinea, a camphor-wood chest containing seven bolts (_i.e._, pieces) of calico, one dozen shirts, one dozen singlets (jerseys), one dozen trousers, one dozen handkerchiefs, two dozen tomahawks, one pound of tobacco, one long fish spear, two fishing lines, one dozen hooks, and two pearl shells, and he finished up by saying, “By golly, he too dear!” If the above price was actually paid, there was some foundation for his exclamation. Once when he sold me something he particularly demanded a tomahawk in exchange, as he had to give one to his mother-in-law to “pay” for his last baby, and he did too. It appears that babies have to be paid for as well.

[127] _Voyage of the “Rattlesnake,”_ 1852.

At the opposite end of British New Guinea, Sir William MacGregor informs us that at Pannaet (Deboyne Island), in the Louisiades, the canoes for which this island is famous are cut out with adzes of hoop-iron, but “they sell the canoes when made at from ten to fifty stone axes. They do not use the stone axe as a tool in this part of the country, but it still represents the standard of currency in great transactions such as the purchase of a canoe, or a pig, or in obtaining a wife. The natives always carefully explain that, as concerns the wife, the stone axes are not given as a payment for her, but as a present to the father of the girl. Steel tomahawks will, however, now be accepted, at least in some cases, in payment of a canoe, and no doubt the days of the currency of the stone axe for these and all other purposes are numbered” (July 1890).[128] In Misima (St. Aignan Island) also “they have entered the iron age, and appear to have entirely given up the use of the stone axe except as a medium for purchasing wives” (October 1888).[129]

[128] _Annual Report of British New Guinea_, C.A. 1, 1892. p. 66.

[129] _Further Correspondence respecting New Guinea_, 1890, C. 5883, p. 251.

The evolution of the money symbol is a very interesting history, and I would refer those who would like to inquire further into it to the masterly work by Professor Ridgeway.[130] In the following brief sketch of this question I draw largely from that book.

[130] W. Ridgeway, _The Origin of Metallic Currency and Weight Standards_, 1892.

Among the Bahnars of Annam, who border on Laos, “everything,” says M. Aymonier, “is by barter, hence all objects of general use have a known relationship; if we know the unit, all the rest is easy.” After enumerating certain exchange values, he continues, “1 _muk_ = 10 _mats_, that is to say, ten of those hoes which are manufactured by the Cedans, and which are employed by all the savages of this region as their agricultural implement. The hoe is the smallest amount used by the Bahnars. It is worth 10 centimes in European goods, and is made of iron.”[131]

[131] _Loc. cit._, p. 23.