Part 3
These four classes of libraries, memory libraries, pictorial object libraries, “mnemonic” libraries, and picture book libraries, form thus the field. All of them existed before what may be called historical libraries; all are found among uncivilized peoples of all times; all have their faint remainders in popular custom among modern civilized nations, and suggestions of all may be found in child-study. Three of these classes, memory libraries, mnemonic libraries and picture book libraries, correspond to well recognized book forms. The term “mnemonic”, which is commonly used to include quipus, message sticks, wampum, and similar records, is itself not a very exact term, since all outward symbols, whether representative or conventional, are mnemonic. Moreover, what is generally meant by the term is the use as symbols of objects which do not represent or directly suggest their meaning—in short, of object signs with conventional rather than pictured meaning but as a matter of fact image signs with conventional meaning i.e. all ideograms or phonograms are equally “mnemonic” with conventional objects. A better distinction is therefore into the memory libraries, object libraries (including both representative, or pictorial, object sign collections and conventional object sign collections) and image libraries (including also both representative or pictorial images and arbitrary or conventional signs). For practical purposes, however, we may perhaps use the terms, memory, object, mnemonic, and picture, understanding by object, pictorial object, by mnemonic, mnemonic object and by picture, pictorial image, as distinguished from the mnemonic or conventionalized images known as ideograms and phonograms. To avoid confusion in this matter it must be kept clearly in mind that writing is not picture writing because its symbols are pictures, but because they picture something. If an ox’s head or its image (aleph or alpha) stands for an ox it is pictorial writing but if it stands for “divinity” it is ideographic and if, as it usually does, it stands for the sound “a” it is phonetic-alphabetic writing: It is pictorial writing only when it suggests its own meaning.
Again it must be said that pictorial writing is not confined to image writing as is usually implied by the phrase “picture writing” but applies just as well to objects. A real ox’s head and horns may mean “ox” or “divinity” or “a” just as well as a painting, drawing or sculpture of it.
Yet again it should be noted that the picture of an ox’s head is itself an object as truly as the head itself. The two kinds of objects might be called real or original objects and image objects but for short “objects” (originals) and “images” serve well enough. Again it should be remembered that an object is not a real object because it is in three dimensions or pictures necessarily drawings or paintings. A petroglyph is as suitable for “picture” writing as a painting (indeed most hieroglyphics are sculptured not drawn or painted). On the other hand a petroglyph is no more an “object” than a painting or drawing is.
With these distinctions in mind the following table of the kinds of symbols used in ancient records will make clear the kinds of primitive libraries.
(A) Objects (1) Pictorial (2) Conventional (Mnemonic) (a) Ideographic (eye images) (b) Phonetic (ear images) (aa) verbal (bb) syllabic (cc) (consonantal) (dd) alphabetic (B) Images (1) Pictorial (2) Conventional (Mnemonic) (a) Ideographic (b) Phonetic (aa) verbal (bb) syllabic (cc) (consonantal) (dd) alphabetic
For each of these kinds of “written” records there is a corresponding kind of library or record collection.
The question of the order of evolution among these various kinds of record collections is closely bound up with that of the evolution of language and handwriting, the very invention of handwriting probably implying a feeling of need for kept records.
The commonly recognized ways of human utterance are gesture and oral speech—the one appealing to the eye, the other to the ear, and each leaving its record probably at different points and in different molecular form in the brain. Hand gesture came in course of time to be the highest type of gesture language, evolving as it did into a highly complex and adaptable type of language, and modern hand writing is simply a form of hand gesture which, by means of ink or lead or chisel, or some other material or instrument, leaves a trail of the hand movement in permanent record.
The question whether gesture language preceded sound language may perhaps be settled by the answer to the question whether in the evolution of living beings the eye preceded the ear. If in the age of reptiles one saw the other glide or the grass move before he heard a swish or hiss, and if he himself first stayed still in order to escape being seen rather than heard, then doubtless gesture language began before sound language, and doubtless again also language began among men with simple gestures rather than simple cries. The biologists say in fact that reaction to light came earlier than reaction to sound, eye before ear, and if this is true, gesture language doubtless preceded oral speech. But, however it may be about simple utterance, when it comes to the matter of permanent external documentary record of utterance, it is clear enough that the records of gesture preceded the records of sound, and for some six thousand or eight thousand years, more or less up to yesterday, the only permanent records, or records in external material, were gesture records. Even phonetic writing, so called, is not sound record but a record of sounds translated into gestures; writing is a gesture sign which stands for a sound, not a record of sound. It is only within our own generation that, through the invention of the phonograph, oral or other sound utterance has been recorded in permanent material and libraries of sound records made possible.
The written recording of even signs for sounds did, however, in the evolution of record keeping mark a very decided advance over all previous methods. It was as great an advance perhaps as articulate speech itself is over gesture language or pantomime, and even greater than the next great step in human evolution, the invention of alphabetic writing. It was certainly a longer step in time from the very first beginnings up to this point than from here to the alphabet, perhaps longer than from 3400 B.C. to 1913 A.D., and the period of premnemonic record collections, therefore, it may be said in all seriousness, is perhaps longer than all later periods of library history put together.
The very first rudiments of record keeping were doubtless developed in the animal mind long before it learned expression to other animals and are to be found in the results recorded in its very structure, of its reactions to its environment. Certainly they began at the point where any experience, say of contact with an obstacle, left such record that on the next occasion action was taken in view of the previous experience.
The first attempt at expression or the effort of one individual to communicate an idea to another by signs may have been a mere movement to attract the attention of the other to the simple fact of its existence, and the first record of expression may have been the simple memory of this movement in the other’s mind.
However this may be, in the course of time and among human beings memory was the first record and as long as life was so simple that a man’s memory was sufficient for his own record uses and he felt no need of communicating to a distance, whether in space or time, the necessity of external records was not felt. As soon, however, as the number of a man’s cattle or cocoanut trees, or the contents of his hunting bag got beyond his count (perhaps beyond the number of his fingers and toes) or he felt the need of sending a message of defiance, peace, or ransom to a neighboring tribe, or from a hunting party back to the cave or wigwam, he began to make visible records—objects, specimens, images, and conventional signs of one sort or another. As the art progressed and became more and more complex, pictures of objects and pictures of gestures became the usual form of record until finally these pictures were recognized as standing for certain groups of sounds and phonetic writing had been invented.
Very soon after the introduction of phonetic writing documents began to abound and the chances of survival, therefore, to multiply. The Palermo stone seems to show that actual records by reign and by year of reign began in Egypt as early as the first king of the first dynasty. However that may be, within a few centuries of this time records and collections of records in Egypt had become abundant and varied, and these contained economic records, records of political and religious events, laws, censuses, etc., at least. In Babylonia too, long before 3200 B.C., there had been collections of laws, and a great variety of economic and religious documents.
In brief it may be said therefore that about 3400, or at least 3200 B.C., the vast number of documents, the firm establishment of phonetic record, the pains taken to insure permanence and the suggestions of methodical arrangement and custody point to the beginning of a strictly historic period.
§ 12. _Memory libraries_
The earliest form of library was, it is to be supposed, the memory library. This term is not fanciful and does not in any sense attempt figuratively to identify the human memory as such with the library. A few years ago this could have been done in an interesting way because a favorite analogy for conceiving the human brain was the system of pigeon-holes with different sorts of ideas classified and put away in their respective compartments furnishing a very exact analogy to a classified library. This analogy is now found less useful than terms of brain paths or other figures, although the actual geometrical location of each word in brain tissue in the case of memory is still not excluded and this possibility must have its bearing on the psychological study of memory libraries.
What is meant here by the memory library refers to the modern psychological study of inward speech and inward handwriting. This accounts for the existence of inward books and collections of books, and a collection of inward books is obviously a real library. It makes little difference where or how these are kept in the brain. They doubtless imply a library economy at least as different from that of printed and bound books as the books themselves are different from papyrus rolls, clay tablets, or phonographic records, but it is a real collection of books and the psychological study of the place and manner of their housing and the method of their arrangement and prompt service to the owner for his use is not a matter of analogy or figure of speech.
The essence of the book is a fixed form of words. The point is that a certain form of words worked into a unity is preserved in exactly that form. The author looks at it as a whole, prunes, corrects, substitutes better words for inferior ones, and generally works over it as a man works over a painting or statue. At the end of the process when the book is finished it is a fixed form of words, a new creation, an individuality. The ordinary habit of thought and conversation does not reach this point of fixed forms of words although in the case of very retentive memories, where the complete verbal form of conversation is remembered, it approaches it. In general men seldom remember the exact phraseology when they listen to a sermon or a story. On the other hand, however, the actor or the professional story teller can summon at will the exact verbal form of a great number of works and each of these works is properly a book. This permanent fixing of form undoubtedly implies some substance in which the words are recorded, but if that substance is the human brain the result is no less a book, a real record in the real substance, than if recorded in outward substance such as stone or ink.
The practice of keeping such inward records of exact fixed forms of words is not only the oldest form of record keeping and one extensively practised in illiterate periods, but it is commonly practised in modern life by orators who speak without notes, and as a method for the teaching of children before they learn to read (“memorizing”) as well as afterwards in the schools.
Among savage peoples the medicine man is often a library of tribal tradition although the modern ethnologists agree that he was by no means the only professional repository of tribal records. The ancient Mexicans, for example, seem to have had special secular chroniclers whose business it was to memorize public events, and to be a sort of walking public records office, memorizing public accounts of all sorts as well as the story of events. According to many critics of the Old Testament this primitive method continued the chief or only method of transmitting records in Palestine for 2000 years after it had given place to writing in Egypt and Babylonia. They hold that the Pentateuch was formed and transmitted by such oral verbal tradition. The Vedic books were, it used to be alleged, gathered and handed down by a rigorous organized system of memorizing, and this has a certain counterpart in modern times in that memorizing of the Confucian books and of the Koran which forms a chief part of the system of education in the respective cases. The strictness with which this method of transmission of memory books has been carried out to the point of fixing every word and even letter is perhaps best illustrated from the Jewish oral tradition as to the sounds of the vowels which apparently continued oral for centuries before they were represented by the vowel point signs.
Whether blind Homer composed his songs and recited them throughout Greece without reducing to writing or not, he might have done so and would have done as many another before him in doing so. As a matter of fact the excavations of the last dozen years show pretty clearly a pre-Homeric Greek writing, and Homer himself indeed once refers to the written tablet. But however that may be, the race of minstrels began long before Homer and still exists. In the Middle Ages they were each a walking library, often with a very large repertory, and the same is often true to-day among their successors the actors, reciters and the lecturers. The learning of poems and declamations by school children often results in an inward collection of definite verbal forms in considerable numbers. A more complex form of memory library is that of certain ancients who are alleged to have organized their slaves into a system, each of the slaves being assigned a certain number of works in a certain class to learn by heart and kept ready on call to recite when any one of these should be desired.
These inward or memory libraries may be distinguished into two chief kinds. As a matter of fact there are almost as many different kinds of inward books as there are outward books, but as the two chief ways of expression are voice and gesture, so the records of oral speech and gesture language, received by eye, ear, or touch, and inwardly recorded, are the chief kinds of memory books. These are quite distinct as to their processes of reception and record, and very possibly occupy different areas of the brain. These differences may in part be realized from common observation, but one must take pains to guard against the assumption that the inward record is a photograph. It is entirely possible that the brain record of the sound “man” differs as much from a picture of a man as the thread of a phonographic record does. The same is true as to the inward record of a picture word or alphabetical handwritten word. The inward record may no more be a microscopic picture than the stenographic sign is. Nevertheless it is not hard to realize that there is somehow within a series of recorded impressions which may be called images, some of which recall sounds and others objects or gestures. The inward language may or may not have to do with sounds. Modern pantomime and the sign language of deaf-mutes and Indians are languages, and it is entirely possible to store in one’s mind an exact series of signs telling a story in gesture language, just as it is possible to store the symbols for sounds or oral speech.
One of the most interesting chapters in the antiquities of ancient nations and of modern savage tribes is the story of liturgical rites, sacred dances, symbolic processions, and the like. Savage dances e.g. sometimes rehearse events of the hunt or war or domestic scenes. In many of these cases what may be called historic events are represented and the whole ceremony is a rehearsal of these events, although wholly in gesture expression, with gesture or object symbols and without speech. It is the recital of visually memorized records in visual symbols, but the records are just as truly definite accounts of events, or records, or books if you like, as if they were oral words remembered and expressed by voice or in writing. In religious dances and dramatic religious ceremonies, the traditional representations were of ideas rather than events—the nature of the world and man, the future world and the means of attaining this,—and these formed groups and sequences of transmitted ideas quite as definite to the initiated as if expressed orally or in writing.
In the ceremonial processions of the Egyptians and in the Greek mysteries, these representations often become very elaborate and were, apparently, in the secret mysteries, often accompanied by oral explanations by the exegete. It is possible that in the case of both Greek and Egyptian mysteries the transmission had even ceased to be exclusive memory transmission, and that written records, or at least mnemonic tokens of some elaborateness, were preserved in the various chests or baskets carried in the ceremonies. However that may be, these were at least the more elaborate historical successors of symbolic dances and other ceremonies, transmitted among primitive men through visual and muscular sense memory, just as poems were preserved in auditory images and transmitted by oral utterance.
The significant point is that whether the ritual used in the mysteries was transmitted in auditory or visual images, and whether these symbols were external and kept in the basket or chest, which was carried about in the procession, or merely kept in memory, they were, so far as they were separate, complete and stable image-forms, real words, books, and libraries.
§ 13. _Pictorial object libraries_
The simplest and presumably earliest form of outward record is the pictorial object record i.e. an object “in which a picture of the thing is given, whereby at a glance it tells its own story” as Clodd (p. 35) says of the corresponding image signs which form what is commonly thought of as “picture writing”. These pictorial objects are distinguished from mnemonic objects (quipu, abacus, etc.) as pictographic image writing is from ideographic and phonetic writing, by the fact that in themselves they suggest somehow the things meant while mnemonic objects or images require previous agreement or explanation.
The pictorial objects used for writing may be whole objects or parts of objects and they may stand for individuals or for classes of things, e.g. a goat’s head may stand for a certain wild goat killed on a certain hunting trip or, with numbers attached, it may stand for a herd of domestic goats.
The earliest records were no doubt whole object records of individuals. When the hunter first brought home his quarry this had in it most of the essential elements of handwriting (those left behind could read in it the record of the trip) and when he brought useless quarry, simply to show his prowess, it had in it all the elements of the record, as has in fact the bringing by a dog of a woodchuck to his master or the bringing home by a modern boy of a uneatable string of fish to “show”. The bringing home from war of living captives to be slain, or dead bodies to be hung from the ship’s prow or nailed on the city gates, has the same motive and the same record character. So too the hanging of criminals on gibbets has the character both of the record-book and the instruction book. In these cases the very object itself is kept and exhibited—the whole object (though without life). Perhaps the nearest approach to the whole object library, in the sense of a permanent collection of records, was when all the permanent spoils of a campaign were “devoted” or “laid up” and kept together for memorial rather than economic purposes in the treasury of the temple.
A strict modern illustration of this case is a collection of battle flags taken or carried in a certain war, campaign or battle. Or again if a modern hunter should have all the spoils of a certain hunt stuffed and mounted as a record of the hunt, this would be of the same nature—a whole object record collection with an object to stand for every individual.
The sample or specimen whole object record as distinguished from the individual record is in modern times extensively known and used in the sale of goods by travelling salesmen. In its rudiments as a means of visible communication of ideas it was doubtless as old and perhaps older even than the keeping of trophies for record. If e.g. man was herbivorous before he was carnivorous then doubtless primitive man scouting for food would bring back specimens for his family just as a modern boy may bring in specimens of the wild grapes or berries that he has found for information of the folks at home. The best modern illustration of the sample or specimen whole object is in museums, menageries, zoological and botanical gardens, and the like, where specimens of various kinds of objects are gathered to stand for classes, without any special regard to the number in the class.
Museums in general illustrate object record. The historical museums generally and collections of historical relics large and small, together with mineral, plant or animal collections of rare objects, otherwise unknown, or species otherwise extinct (e.g. the American bison) are of the nature of individual whole object records, while all museums come so close to the idea of the library, either in the matter of record or in the purpose of message or information, that one is tempted to describe museums as rudimentary libraries, and libraries as more complex museums. Art museums are in this aspect a sort of transition between the museum proper or whole object library and the library proper or the image-symbol-record collection.