Part 5

Primitive picture writing on other materials than human skin is found all over the world. It may be drawn, painted, engraved, chiseled, modeled, moulded, woven or inlaid. The petroglyphs or aboriginal rock carvings (more often engravings) and the paintings are the most typical kinds although perhaps not the most common. Both of these kinds are found all over the world; most famously perhaps among the Australians, the Bushmen and the North American Indians. The use by the North American Indians is said to have reached its highest development among the Kiowa and the Dakota tribes in their calendars. “These calendars are painted on deer, antelope, and buffalo hides, and constituted a chronology of past years. The Dakota calendars have a picture for each year ... while that of the Kiowa has a summer symbol and a winter symbol, with a picture or device representing some noteworthy event” (Hodge). It is said of the petroglyphs that they “record personal achievements and happenings more frequently than tribal histories ... are known often to be the records of the visits of individuals to certain places, signposts to indicate the presence of water or the direction of a trail, to give warning or to convey a message ... and many of them ... [are] connected with myths, rituals, and religious practices” (Hodge). “Sometimes a man painted his robe in accordance with a dream, or pictured upon it a yearly record of his own deeds or of the prominent events of the tribe.” “The horses of warriors were often painted to indicate the dreams of the war experiences of their riders.”

In the matter of abbreviation it was in image writing as in object writing. It begins with whole object images and passes through various stages of abbreviation until it goes over from the pictorial to the mnemonic stage.

In image writing this process has many illustrations running back to the cave drawings where the head or horns of an ox or goat are given instead of the whole animal. This convention was used over the whole Mediterranean region and apparently became the direct ancestor of the Hebrew aleph, the Greek alpha, and our modern English a. The letter a as now used in the alphabet appears to be the end of a long historical process of conventionalizing by which user after user has tried to simplify the strokes required more and more or, as the modern complacent “inventors” of the ancient principles which they now call “efficiency” would say, “reduce the motions required” until the present form has been reached.

In image writing too is more clearly seen the development of what may be called sample-and-number abbreviation.

The earliest way of representing several animals seems to have been the making several like symbols—one for each. Five oxen, e.g. are expressed by five pictures. It is entirely natural that when a man is writing the same picture several times, one after another, and knows that others will know it to be a repetition, the process of conventionalizing, which goes on so fast under ordinary circumstances, should go even faster, until pictures four and five become simple scrawls and in the course of time the whole is reduced to practically a single picture and four straight lines. Here we have the individual record and the sample record combined.

True picture writing is not very common on the ancient monuments and is chiefly to be studied in the primitive writings of uncivilized tribes such as the Bushmen and the North American Indians. There are, however, both in the Assyrian and Egyptian hieroglyphics many traces of the older pictures from which these are derived and the idea of the picture writing is seen in great fullness in the determinatives of the Egyptian writing, although it is likely that these are not so much remains as restorations. They consist, as is well known, of pictures which suggest something of the meaning of the word, e.g. all words related to writing are followed by the pictures of the scribe’s palette, with pen and ink moistener. This suggests at once that the word has something to do with writing. It is likely that the attaching of these to phonetic signs was the result of finding that there were so many words which had the same sounds.

A very simple example of picture writing is given in Hoffman (p. 95) with its explanation. A canoe with a torch in the bow, three bucks and a doe, the sign for a lake, and the picture of two wigwams tells the story of a hunting expedition by torchlight on the lake from which three bucks and a doe were brought back to the wigwam. A slightly more complex one is given in Figure 3, which is the record of a shaman’s curing of a sick man. A more complex one, given on page 26, with its explanation on pages 170-72, is the mnemonic song of an Ojibway medicine man.

One method of picture writing shows an action by several successive stages of the same act. This is most commonly a picture of corresponding gesture signs. The picture writing by successive pictures, showing successive stages of a story, is a favorite method in the modern German humorous illustrated papers, and has, of course, its perfect modern counterpart in the cinematograph.

Any collection of wampum belts, birch bark, calendar skins, blankets, or other picture writing records, is of course a picture library which has already begun to take on the distinct character of the modern library.

§ 16. _Ideographic records_

Ideograms are the mnemonic stage of image writing. They may be recognizable pictures but, if so, their meanings have no relation to the picture itself. The head of an ox, for example, when it stands for an ox is picture writing, but when it stands for divinity or for the sound “a” it is an ideogram. All hieroglyphic and alphabetic writing is, therefore, in a way ideographic, but we are accustomed to distinguish phonetic writing and to leave for ideograms proper only those pictures which appeal to eye rather than ear. Some people read even alphabetical printed words as ideograms—the word suggests its object directly without being translated into its sounds. Some, on the other hand, cannot read even to themselves without thinking in sounds or even moving the lips.

Ideographic records so shade into the picture writing or the pictorial image record on the one hand and into phonetic writing and the book form common and appropriate to phonetic writing on the other, that it is not easy to single out any examples of exclusive ideographic record collections, although of course such collections are entirely conceivable, and the earliest traces of Egyptian or Sumerian hieroglyphics seem to suggest the stage where documents were in ideograms of whole words, but at this stage ideogram and phonogram would be almost indistinguishable as it would be a subjective matter as to whether it suggested to any given individual a visual image directly or only indirectly, through an ear picture.

§ 17. _Types of primitive libraries_

Various illustrations of the different kinds of primitive libraries, possible or actual, have already been suggested. These may be summarized as private record collections and tribal record collections, as pictorial, mnemonic, and mixed, as object, image, and mixed, and as priestly and secular. The matter may be made perhaps a little more concrete by considering two types as to which we do not have to rely on historical allusion, but of which we have concrete examples—votive offering collections and libraries for the dead. With votive offering collections are, of course, to be associated the medicine bag, amulets, magical charm collections, and that whole class of primitive records or symbolic objects which center in the religious head of the tribe. The libraries for the dead, consisting as they do of objects buried with the deceased, are essentially collections of personal records corresponding with the modern private library. Collections of public records, not kept with the religious collections, are well attested among primitive people, and existed from very early times in Egypt and Babylonia, but on the whole the inference of anthropology seems to be that up to the neighborhood of the historical period the head of the tribe was both priest and king, as the Czar of Russia is both Emperor and head of the orthodox church, and religious and political collections one. The priest king seems to have been the rule even in early historical times, and temple and royal archives one, differentiated only as the numbers of the nation and the complexity of the civilization grew. At all events, we have abundant remains of temple collections of symbolic objects or so-called “votive offerings”, including much unmistakable “writing” and we have also a considerable number of examples of similar objects buried with the dead, from very various localities all over the world.

The objects gathered together at shrines are commonly known as votive offerings, but the actual uses and reasons for their collection are much more various than is suggested by the ordinary meaning of the votive offering, while, as a matter of fact, most of such objects are not offerings at all, but only substitute object image records of such offerings, or even mere symbols for offerings. A good type of this latter class is the Chinese sacrifice which consists in writing prayers on a piece of paper and burning the paper. But there are thousands of illustrations in actual collections of something very close to this, throwing most interesting light on the writing character of these collections. The collections formed very soon after the invention of phonetic handwriting in particular give very clean-cut illustrations of the meaning of many classes of these temple deposits of symbolic and mnemonic objects, and this in turn casts light on the primitive object collections of the shaman and the tribal story teller.

To begin with, a list of the objects found in the Hopi North American Indian shrines, as given by J. W. Fewkes, will illustrate the fact of the varied contents of aboriginal shrines: “The temporary offerings in shrines are prayer meal and pollen, sticks, clay effigies of small animals, miniature bowls and vases of water, small bows and arrows, small dolls, turquoise, shells, and other objects.” “Among the permanent objects not offerings ... human or animal images of wood and stone, concretionary or botryoidal stones, carved stone slabs, and fossil shells” (Hodge).

The historical votive offering collections of Greece, Crete, Egypt, and Babylonia extend over long periods, and the objects recovered from them include hundreds of thousands of record objects. These include, as in the case of the Hopi shrines, a great many objects not intended as offerings at all. The temple treasuries, even in very early times, were used as a sort of general safety deposit vault, the protection consisting not only in the watchfulness of the priest but the tabu, or curse laid upon those who should even approach the objects, and the general belief that they were in fact under the protection of the god who would punish theft. Such objects might be taken again by the owner, as is shown in the case of the Greek temple treasuries, or they were things held in trust by the priests for the benefit of widows and orphans as was the case of the Jewish temple. Moreover, even the record objects were by no means confined to records of the fact, the nature, and the extent of the offerings made, although a great portion of them were precisely for this record purpose. Increasingly, and at last very extensively, they included records of events of war, hunting, and in later times of the public games. They were in the Greek temples very extensively biographical or genealogical and tended to be so progressively. Indeed vast quantities of tablets “laid up” in the temples had no connection with sacrifice at all but were merely records deposited as one might deposit family manuscripts or present a printed autobiography to a public library. The votive collection was simply a public reference library as distinguished from political archives or school libraries for instruction or learning.

The more strictly votive records were themselves of great variety. They include object records, sample records, models, pictures, symbol records, and phonetic inscription records. But, whatever the form, the underlying idea or motive is the same, they are records of offerings made, whether those offerings are sacrifice or thank offerings. The treasury of the Greek temple was sometimes a separate building by itself filled with these records. The Jewish temple had separate treasuries for war trophies and for other votive offerings. Primarily, of course, these treasuries were in fact intended for the actual objects—the tithe of the first fruits, the tithe of the spoils taken in war, and the animals intended for sacrifice, but as these were intended for consumption, the records took their place and in later times increasingly images and even verbal statements were used as offerings in place of real objects, forming, so to speak, a collection of fiction or perhaps better, the actual records of real spiritual acts performed, signifying petition, sacrifice, thanksgiving, etc. of the worshiper. The innumerable tables with record of cattle in the great cattle pens of the Babylonian temples, although perhaps not to be described themselves as “votive offerings”, actually correspond to the later practice, where the votive offering is kept as records of offerings, and correspond very closely in the case of war trophies, where it often happened that a part was dedicated and the rest sold or melted down and made into valuable objects which in turn might, in case of need, be converted into cash and have an image or some other record substitute.

After the war trophies and perhaps before them, the most significant class of offerings was that of the first fruits which ranged through the whole field of human production from the fruit of mines, fields, orchards, vineyards, hunting, fisheries, flocks, up through the trades of fuller, potter, baker, tanner, shipwright, wash-woman, butcher, cook, basket-maker, shoemaker, and so on up to professional men, recorders and the first copy of literary works. When possible the offering might be and was originally in kind, but when not, as in the case of the physician or the recorder, it would be in the shape of money or, more likely in the case of the physician, an image in some valuable substance of the particular operation or disease for which fee was received (e.g. the golden tumors which the Philistines sent to the Jewish shrine). These were extremely common as the free-will offerings or vow payments among those who had been healed. When money began to take the place of barter the replacing of objects by their money value with registry of same in the books of the temple grew with it and became the tithe-tax still familiar in the English language and English society.

An extremely interesting library aspect of these (votive) collections is the actual phonetically written books which were laid up. These can be best illustrated from the Greek collections of books dedicated, but have their precise technical equivalent in the books which Joshua, Samuel, or Moses “laid up” before Jehovah, and indeed the technical term is precisely that for putting a book into a library or a document into the archives. The Greek collections included literary works, prize poems, hymns to Dionysus, Apollo, Asclepius, etc. These may have been of a strictly votive character, and this is true of many other works by Pindar, Hesiod, Heraclitus, Aristomache, Aristotle, Agathias, Alcaeus, and Solon which may perhaps be first fruits. This might also be true, of course, of the astronomy of Eudoxus, the astronomical table of Onopides, the calculations of Xenocrates and the log book of Hanno. But these at least point to very varied contents of these “votive” libraries. These examples above mentioned were on varied materials as well, including at least lead, gold, marble, and bronze, apparently, as well as papyrus or leather. Some of the works were in shorthand. While it is not easy to conceive of literary works as first fruits in the earlier period of the primitive writing and for the reason that such forms are themselves a later development, many of the mnemonic objects preserved in primitive collections certainly stand for prayers and hymns as well as narrative records and in the collections of sacred liturgical objects these represented set liturgical forms of words or dramatic procedures which are books in quite a developed sense.

A curiously interesting suggestion which seems to throw light on the literary meaning of votive objects is the statement by Miss Harrison that the sacred tokens of Zeus as god of the storeroom were symbols, not statues, and probably sacred tokens such as those carried in chests at the sacred processions,—magic spells in short, kept in a jar for the safeguarding of the storeroom. The farther identification of these with the ambrosia and with Zeus himself seems to make rather clear that many of the collections of sacred emblems are verbal documents. The relation of this to what was before said of the keeping of books in jars is obvious, and the fact is suggested that many of the so-called collections of votive offerings are of this character, that is, mnemonic objects, perhaps actual collections of verbal forms.

Libraries for the dead are most familiar and most highly developed in the Egyptian burial customs. From a very early date various books, generally known in their collected state now as chapters of the Book of the Dead, were always buried with the important dead. Another famous example of this burial of phonetic books with the dead is found in the so-called Orphic or Petalian gold tablets, found at various points from Asia Minor to Italy. The most interesting class, however, from our point of view is the large quantities of quipus which have been found in the Peruvian graves.

All these libraries should be clearly distinguished from other collections of buried books, such as those which the Jews made of worn and mutilated books. They are distinctly collections made for the use of the dead. Some of them are for use during the journey to the Elysian fields, the garden of Aalu, or the happy hunting grounds, some apparently rather for use after reaching them. The Egyptian books are rather clearly associated with the idea of the amulets and the other written charms, though on a higher plane. The idea seems to have been that the deceased should learn them by heart and recite them at various points as passwords for admission to the various gates or to pass various defenders of paradise. The Petalian tablets are precisely of the same character. In the case of the quipus, and of symbolic emblems generally, the analogy is perhaps rather to be found in the Egyptian models of tools and servants, and the hunting weapons buried with the North American Indians, also children’s playthings everywhere, where the point seems to be to supply the dead with their customary instruments for use after they have arrived in paradise.

Other objects of dress, ornament, etc., found in graves, strongly suggest the similar collection during life, where clothing and ornament is personal record of events or achievements in a man’s life. Probably not all grave collections include the same elements, but it seems likely that all three elements of personal record, guides to paradise, and libraries for paradise, are to be recognized at one point or another.

The quipus form the clearest example, and the long history of knot amulets suggests that they may have been intended primarily to play precisely the same part that the various parts or chapters of the Book of the Dead played. The equally extensive use, however, of knots for records or reminders, as in the mnemonic fringes, allows the possibility of the individual personal record, and there is, of course, also the possibility that the graves in which they were found were the graves of tribal recorders or reciters who carried with them the implements of their trade in the same spirit that the hunting weapons were carried, or, on the other hand, in the spirit of the suicide of a king’s servants that they might serve him in the other world, and of the Ushabtiu substitutes for this. These models of servants, boats, war implements, and the like, in graves seem to be precisely analogous to the miniatures substituted for actual objects in votive offerings.

Burial with the dead of a person’s favorite belongings has also to be reckoned with in interpreting these collections. Sometimes all a man’s favorite possessions were buried with him, and it not infrequently happens in modern civilized times that a person has a favorite ornament or possession buried with him. It was only yesterday that a man provided for having his cremated body sunk in his favorite yacht.

§ 18. _Contents of primitive libraries_

The various kinds of documents in the several sorts of primitive writing found in the different species of collections have been indicated under the various headings. It is worth while however to gather these up together a little and especially in view of the question of actual origin.

It has been noted that collections of quipu, message sticks, fetishes, personal ornaments, skin calendars, totems, votive objects and other pictorial or mnemonic records in temples, graves, medicine tents, private wigwams, etc., include, in pre-phonetic times, records of personal exploits and events in personal history, family histories, and tribal histories, hymns, prayers, amulets, financial accounts, and economic records of various sorts, annual registers, contracts, astronomical observations, etc.

All this has its bearing on the actual origin of libraries. Messrs. Tedder and Brown in their excellent article in the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica say that “the earliest use to which the invention of inscribed or written signs was put was probably to record important religious and political transactions”. Now as a matter of fact, the conscious record of events and transactions selected as important for the knowledge of posterity, or even, what was probably a much earlier matter, for evidence of contract or practical memorandum, represents a rather late stage in the evolution of record. It is likely that there were many record collections before this stage was reached, trophy, votive, etc., object records and economic records of various sorts.

In point of fact as King remarks of the earliest Sumerian records, a large quantity of the earliest records are land deeds, and any one who looks over the cuneiform documents will be impressed with the fact that an enormously large proportion of the existing documents of the early historical period are contracts or lists of cattle or, as in the Cretan excavation, labels, or lists of arrows and other materials laid up in storehouses. Among Egyptian documents too, the annals of the Palermo stone, the earliest systematic annals of Egypt, which incorporate earlier documents from its own time (say 2700 B.C.) to six or seven centuries farther back, are to a considerable extent filled with memoranda of census lists of cattle taken and other lists of possessions. It has already been noticed that among the commonest earliest uses of notch, knot and pebble systems was use for the record of cattle or other numerical lists of possessions.