Part 4

Whole object record is, however, evidently cumbersome, and man, observing this, early learned a fact very significant for the history of handwriting i.e. that for record, reminder, or information, a part of an object may serve just as well as a whole object. This principle of the abbreviation of signs for the sake of economy is perhaps the most striking and consistent principle in the whole history of handwriting. It is the principle which led not only from the whole to the part and sample but from the part object to the mnemonic object, from object to image, from image to ideogram, and which prevails throughout the whole farther development of phonetic handwriting, during which picture phonetic signs became more and more conventionalized, through syllabic writing into alphabetic, and it is the law which has produced the numerous variations in the numberless historical alphabets, issuing also finally in numberless systems of stenography. This abbreviation is very early found in war trophies and in hunting trophies. In war it was found that the heads, hands, ears or scalps of enemies or even the left hand or right hand or ear, as conventionally agreed upon, was just as good an evidence of prowess and much more transportable than whole bodies—and Borneo and Filipino head hunters and American Indian scalpers have practised this discovery in very recent times.

In the case of hunting trophies the history was the same. Actual bodies brought back from a hunting trip were not altogether a permanent record, but after the tribal feast or sacrifice (commonly perhaps in earliest times both in one) the head and skin remained and formed a potentially more permanent record. Even in modern times such skins may be kept as wholes—stuffed for museum purposes or as hunting trophies, and they are, indeed, often mounted as rugs with both head and tail attached. In this stage they form what may be still counted as whole object records but from this stage object abbreviation followed as rapidly as in war trophies. If the skin was separated from head and horns for economic reasons, either was found to serve the purposes of record. A man’s collection of pelts e.g. is obviously a collection of hunting records as well as a collection of wealth. The Egyptian determinative for quadruped is, as a matter of fact, the picture not of a whole animal but of a skin with tail and without head. On the other hand, head and horns served equally as well for record as skin and tail, whether the purpose was a mere record of exploits or a record of sacrifices. This precise stage is amply represented in the modern hunting lodge with its heads of moose or other animals, and it is possible that the expression so many “head of cattle” is a relic of this stage.

In each of these cases the principle of the characteristic part obtains i.e. the abbreviation is not beyond the point where the object can be recognized at sight as standing for a certain animal.

The principle of the characteristic part once established, the tendency to abbreviation for the sake of economy in transportation, storage, or exhibition, led rapidly to the use of the very simplest unmistakable part showing the individual and then to the simplest unmistakable part showing kind. In the case of war-trophies head was reduced to scalp, and this was conventionalized again so that the trophy scalp consisted of a very small portion from a particular point on the head. In the case of hunting trophies, the head was reduced to perhaps ears or horns, tusks or teeth. The process is found definitely illustrated in the Cretan history in the reduction of the ox’s head to simple horns in ritual use, and vestiges of this are probably also to be found in the symbolic use of horns on altars, horns on men as a symbol of power, and the like. On the other hand the skin and tail separated from the horns followed the same law of progressive economy and was reduced perhaps to the tail only (the fox’s brush) or the claws (the primitive claw necklaces).

The modern bounty on wolf scalps contains the whole principle of characteristic part abbreviation up to this point in a nutshell. It is the smallest unmistakable readily recognized and nonduplicable part. It is important for individual record that it should not be possible to collect two bounties on one wolf or to boast of two fish caught or two dead enemies, where there has been but one.

It is thus not fancy or jest to say the scalp belt of an American Indian chief (albeit this did not play such a part in the Indian world as is commonly imagined), or the tiger-tooth necklace of the African chief, is a collection of records representing a rather advanced stage of evolution.

Abbreviations in the case of sample records may be carried one step farther still, for a single eagle’s feather or a very small piece of fur shows kind just as well as a head or tail or a whole skin.

Perhaps the best examples of collections of record objects in the most abbreviated forms are, for individual records, the collections of trophies worn on the person, and for specimen records the medicine bag of West Africa.

Individual trophy collections are common to all primitive peoples and everywhere tended towards abbreviated trophies which could be worn. It would be more than rash to trace the use of clothing and all personal adornment to the wearing of trophies as there is some slight temptation to do, but trophy necklaces, feather bonnets, and the like, were certainly worn in many tribes and without very much other clothing, either of protective or ornamental character. The leopard’s tooth necklace of the African chief, recording the number of leopards slain by his tribe, and the feather bonnet of the American Indian, are true record collections. In general all objects of personal adornment among primitive peoples are symbolic, that is, they have meaning and are of the nature of writing. They are kept for record rather than as objects of beauty or for the enhancement of personal beauty. Labrets, for example, are a sign of aristocratic birth, and even if the objects worn are ritual rather than trophy in character, still each one has its symbolic meaning, and the expert may read in each collection a tale of events or of specific religious ideas almost as clearly as in the phonetic words of a printed book.

The West African medicine bag, like other medicine bags, contained a collection of so called fetish objects of all sorts—bits of fur, feathers, claws, hair, twigs, bark, etc., etc.—but the use of these objects was not for medicine or magical purposes as commonly understood. They formed obviously an object record collection quite in the nature of a collection of books. As each object was drawn out of the bag, the keeper of the bag recited some appropriate tale or formula for which the object stood.

This probably casts light on many other so-called fetish collections of primitive people, as for example those of the North American Indians. “Mooney says, in describing the fetish, that it may be a bone, a feather, a carved or painted stick, a stone arrowhead, a curious fossil or concretion, a tuft of hair, a necklace of red berries, the stuffed skin of a lizard, the dried hand of an enemy, a small bag of pounded charcoal mixed with human blood—anything, in fact ... no matter how uncouth or unaccountable, provided it be easily portable and attachable. The fetish might be ... even a trophy taken from a slain enemy, or a bird, animal, or reptile.” (Hodge. HandbAmInd 1:458.)

These fetishes might be kept in the medicine sack (the Chippewa pindikosan) or “It might be fastened to the scalp-lock as a pendant, attached to some part of the dress, hung from the bridle bit, concealed between the covers of a shield, or guarded in a special repository in the dwelling. Mothers sometimes tied the fetish to the child’s cradle.” (Hodge. HandbAmInd 1:458.)

These fetishes represent not only events but ideas (a vision, a dream, a thought, or an action). They represent not only religious and mythological ideas and tribal records, but individual exploits in war or hunting and other individual records. In short, the medicine bag the world over is a collection of recorded ideas, both of historical and mythological character if not also of an economic character.

So far as the “fetish” objects are not trophy objects, but stand for ideas, they form a transition to the mnemonic object, but so long as the object is such as to suggest to the keeper and expounder the idea of the particular form of words or ideas which he relates, it is still to be counted as object rather than mnemonic writing e.g. if a bit of fox fur suggests a story of a fox, it is still to be counted a pictorial object rather than a mnemonic object.

If twenty eagle feathers, e.g. stand for twenty eagles, or twenty small bits of fur for twenty reindeer, these sample objects are still used pictorially, but if a feather head-dress is made of eagle’s feathers, each feather symbolizing some particular exploit, the matter has passed over from the pictorial to the mnemonic stage.

§ 14. _Mnemonic object libraries_

Mnemonic writing, as it is generally treated in the textbooks, includes all sorts of simple memory aids, and is generally, and probably rightly, regarded by writers of palaeography as preceding picture writing, although there is an element of abstractness even in the tally or knotted cord or pebble as compared with the actual imitation or representation of the picture, and in the evolution of human thinking, other things being equal, the abstract necessarily follows the concrete in time and in the order of evolution.

The most familiar examples of mnemonic books are the quipus or knotted cord books, the notch books, which include tallies and message sticks, the wampum belts of American Indians, and the abacus. Collections of any of these kept in the medicine tent or temple, or even the counting house, are, of course, true libraries, or at least true collections of written documents as generally understood by the historians of writing.

The knotted cord is best known under the name of quipu, which was the name for the Peruvian knot record. At bottom the idea does not differ from the simple tying of knots in a handkerchief as a reminder, or the sailor’s log line. It has been most commonly used for numerical records, but in many cases it preserved and transmitted very extensive historical records. One very simple use was the noting on different colored cords by knots the number of the different animals taken to market for sale, and again the price received for these at market.

It is still used among the Indians of Peru and some North American Indians, also in Hawaii and among various African tribes, and all over Eastern Asia and the Pacific.

It was the traditional method in China before the use of written characters, and the written characters themselves were, it is alleged, made up out of these combined with the pictures of bird tracks.

Among the ancient civilizations there are many remains or reminiscences of these knot books. They are found among the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics (as in the sign for amulet and perhaps in several other signs); they appear also in the mnemonic knotted fringes to garments in the Jewish antiquities and, as Herodotus tells us, Darius made use of such knots to guide certain Ionians who remained behind to guard a bridge as to when it should be time for them to sail away. In 1680 the Pueblo Indians of North America marked the days to their uprising in the same way.

This use of the knotted cord for amulets is among the most widespread of uses, being found among the medicine men of nearly all primitive peoples. Juno wore such an amulet, and Ulysses carried one.

Among the ancient Peruvians and Mexicans there were many collections of quipus in charge of official recorders.

Traces of ancient use survive in the knots of a cardinal’s hat and perhaps most interestingly of all in the nautical knot used in casting the log or sounding. We may still travel so many knots an hour or sink mayhap so many fathoms deep. The knotted measuring line with fathom marks is probably the direct historical descendant of the Egyptian measuring line and by the same token probably of the Egyptian sign for one hundred, the fathom like one of the Egyptian units being at bottom the stretch of a man’s arm.

Most of the extant quipus have been found in graves. There is a “very extensive collection” of these in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and a recent study of these (by L. L. Locke) concludes that they were used purely for numerical purposes and not for counting but for record keeping.

The best known notch books are the message sticks used in Australia and Africa and the tally used in the British Exchequer up to a recent date for the keeping of accounts. This is the method, famous in fiction for the recording on their knife-hilts by Indians and superhuman white scouts of the number of scalps taken in war. It is the essence of the so-called Clog Almanac, the nick-stick, and other ways of notching up accounts still often found in rural communities. The memory of it survives in the use of the word score or so many tallies, used until recently of the runs made in baseball.

Collections of notch records are found at least among the Australian aborigines—and it will be remembered that it was the burning of the huge collection of tallies in the early part of the last century which resulted in the setting fire to and burning up of the parliament houses.

It is possible that the notch method was preceded by a system of stripping off leaves or twigs from a branch, leaving a certain number. The early pictures of Seshait, goddess of writing among the Egyptians, who records the years of a king’s reign, suggests possibly this method, and in this case perhaps also the Egyptian sign for year with its single projection may refer to this method.

Wampum is one of the best known and most picturesque forms of mnemonic object writing. It was used by the American Indians for treaties, title deeds, memorials of events, etc., and considerable collections of these tribal records were not uncommon. Although in itself a later and more complex style, in essence it stands for a style still older than the knot writing which it resembles. Existing examples of wampum leave the simple mnemonic knot or notch far behind and have progressed even to figures or pictures often of an advanced or symbolic type, made in the beads, but the beads themselves stand for what may perhaps be the very earliest form of mnemonic record—that is the object record where each object is represented not by a pictorial object but by some sample object like a pebble or a twig. The heap of pebbles used for counting was possibly the very earliest mnemonic record.

An extremely interesting modern example of calculation in pebbles and the representation by them even of sums in addition, multiplication, and subtraction, turns up among the psychological investigations in the matter of mathematical prodigies. It appears that most of the famous lightning calculators have been the children of peasants, and a large part of these Italian shepherd boys, who apparently used pebbles for the counting of their sheep and amused themselves by making a plaything of these. Other lightning calculators (Ampère e.g.) used pebbles, and Bidder a bag of shot, while others have taught themselves by the use of marbles, peas, or the use of their fingers. (Bruce in McClure v. 39, 1912, pp. 593-4.) The counting by pebble heaps is found indeed generally in the playing of children. When it comes to transporting or making more permanent collections this was done by means of a pouch in the case of pebbles—one of the earliest forms of record holder and one of the most ancient forms even of phonetic writings, or tying together in bundles as in the case of twig bundles found among primitive peoples, or by stringing together as in trophy necklaces or some forms of the abacus.

With these mnemonic object writings is perhaps also to be classed the symbols formed with bits of wood used in the Indian game of cañute described by J. P. Harrington. “The San Ildefonso cañute figures present a symbolism so highly conventionalized and so complex that the term language might well be applied—a symbolism not essentially different in origin or practice from human speech, gesture language, African drum language, conventionalized graphic designs that have a commonly understood meaning, or writing whether executed in pictograms, ideograms, phonograms, or phonetic symbols” (AmAnthropol n.s. 14, 1912, p. 265). “These figures are, it is said, made much in the same fashion as children graphically represent certain ideas by arranging small objects.”

§ 15. _Picture book libraries_

Savage tribes in general have not progressed beyond the image stage of writing or at most beyond a sort of syllabic stage which corresponds to what we know as the rebus. This picture writing is the known origin however of all the oldest historical writing systems. As we all know, children too read their picture books long before they read print or writing. Picture writing and picture books have always survived among cultured nations and have a great vogue to-day, especially through the introduction of pictures into newspapers and through moving pictures.

The earliest existing picture writing of the Stone Age includes many images of domestic animals in the caves of the Pyrenees with apparently conventional signs sometimes accompanying them. Prehistoric picture writing in the Mediterranean regions includes also pottery marks, figures of animals or parts of animals used to distinguish ships and having their modern counterpart in the ship’s figurehead, also the seals, milk-stones of Crete, the rock carvings of Liguria and the like.

The very first beginnings of picture writing are perhaps to be found in natural object images. The Chinese ascribed the origin of their written characters to bird tracks, and many primitive peoples used stones which accidentally resembled animals as images of them.

Perhaps the most natural and earliest reading of records is the reading of footprints of hunted birds and animals. From these tracks the expert woodsman may read the kind and number of individuals passing, the direction that they are taking, and many other details. This fact is familiar with all hunting, and it is famous in the trailing of both men and animals by American Indians and by primitive people generally. The method is still much used in the tracking of criminals by footprints, and more especially and scientifically in these days by finger-print records. These records are actual images of parts of individuals, and it is not incredible, even if not evidenced, that the earliest use of writing by the Chinese should have been the imitation of birds’ tracks in clay by some hunter in order to describe the kind of birds that he had seen.

It has been mentioned at various points in this paper that the record of number is near, if not at, the beginning of permanent records, and Gow, in his History of Greek mathematics, has a theory that the record of numbers above ten began by impressing the ten fingers in the moist earth.

Another very early form was the natural rock having some accidental resemblance to bird or beast, or else formed by very slight chipping of a natural image, as in some cases in the Pyrenean caves. Various American Indian tribes used natural fossils or accidental images in this way. The transition from a slight chipping to sculpture is, of course, an easy one.

Perhaps the simplest and most natural transition from pictorial object to image writing is suggested by the trophy records of an African chief as described by Frobenius. The actual record trophies of leopard hunting—the leopard’s teeth—are taken and worn in a necklace by the chief and form a tribal record. The individual making the killing has, however, a wooden model of the tooth which he wears as an individual trophy. This very simple and natural proceeding has in it the germ of picture writing,—is indeed picture writing.

Among the more primitive forms of picture writing are tattooing and body painting. Tattooing is used among many savage tribes to-day and all over the world. This was known in the most ancient times and is often practised to-day especially by sailors and boys, sometimes quite elaborately. Among the savage tribes it was used for religious, political, and economic purposes. One use was as identification mark. This might be a tribal mark or individual mark, and in either case is very closely connected with the totem idea. In either case it might also be used, and was used, as a property or ownership mark to which the tattoo mark corresponded. This is perhaps linked with the ancient Egyptian tattooing through the tribal mark of the modern Nubian.

The war paint of the American Indian is as old as the Stone Age in the Mediterranean and is made most curiously interesting by a considerable number of so called Pintadores still existent. These Pintadores form the earliest known step in the history of printing, for they consist of stamps with which the paint could be applied in various figures after the fashion of the modern rubber stamp. These figures, like the war paint of the American Indians, probably had various symbolic meanings according to the figures and the colors used, and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that there were libraries of printed books in this Stone Age—if by any chance collections of sample impressions from these stamps were kept for any purpose. At any event, when applied they formed what some people would call a living library. Certain tablets possibly used for a similar purpose have been found also among the North American Indians.

Body and face painting naturally preceded tattooing—the latter being simply a method of making the record permanent. The methods may or may not have arisen from the marks made by the pressure of trophy necklaces, bracelets, etc., on the skin, or from being etched by the sun on the unprotected skin of light complexioned tribes. However they may have arisen, these two methods of skin marking are among the very early forms of record, were often used to record exploits or events, and sometimes to record an extraordinary number and variety of matters. It seems also to be established that these body pictures were sometimes intended as copies of trophy necklaces or other ornaments.

There are many ways beside skin marks in which the idea of image making might have suggested itself to primitive man, inheriting as he perhaps did from an animal ancestry a strong instinct for imitation—the shadow, reflection in water, actual fossils of animals, the etching of sunburn, the silhouette of a tree or animal against the horizon, natural stone forms, tracks in clay, etc.—but in skin marks, natural or artificial, we see the transition process in actual operation.

The fact that savages, when they took off their detachable ornaments to go to war or for ritual dances and the like, put on paint, suggests possibly that the painted forms are images of the things removed.