Part 6

It would be jumping at conclusions to say that the conventional sign attached to or accompanying the pre-historic animal paintings of the caves were numbers. They may quite likely be ownership marks. It is a curious fact, which has recently been commented on, that these animal paintings are of domestic animals and if so the ownership marks themselves would be pictures of the marks actually branded upon the animals just as such marks are still branded on cattle on the plains and by New England farmers on their sheep. The fact that the tendency seems to be to regard the contents of these caves as religious, and the use of the caves as for religious purposes, suggests an analogy with votive offerings. If the marks are in fact numbers, the combination of figure and number suggests at once the innumerable lists of animals in the Babylonian temple records. Ownership marks themselves are, of course, not records of events but economic records and are very common before the use of phonetic writing. One very large class of these is the pottery mark which was first applied apparently by the man who made them for himself as an ownership mark and then, as one became more skilled in one thing and another and barter began, it passed into the trade-mark of manufacturers which has survived in the modern trade-mark system.

It does not, of course, follow that the earliest documents were not also religious as well as business and political, or even religious as distinguished from the political. Actual evidence, so far as it goes, seems to point to trophy records and votive records,—and votive records of first fruits or other useful or valuable objects “laid up” are economic records, but the parallel evidence as to priest king, the evidence as to religious sanction for the protection of objects, the hypothesis of priestly guidance in the tribal meal for fair apportionment of spoils, etc., point to religious supervision of economic matters. In the savage state the rule is that when food is scanty the strong eat what they want and the weak starve—the rule of the wolf pack. The germ of all social order is perhaps the rule that the weak also shall share in limited food. Founded possibly in selfishness—the will to keep the weak alive for selfish reasons, it involves at least power of individual self-control, the considering of remoter ends and a certain social-consciousness. The right sharing of food supply requires a strong hand under savage conditions and every possible sanction of authority. It was quite natural therefore that the common meal “before God” which plays such a large part in primitive custom should grow up—and equally natural that it should be the symbol of peace. The priest, standing for God, divided the offering—no doubt in the beginning the whole food supply—and perhaps “kept” the natural relics of the feast in the way of skins and bones.

Provisionally therefore one may venture the hypothesis that the actual beginnings of record collections were economic under religious direction,—and are to be found in the remains of tribal feasts “before God” although it may be fair to say that the rudiments of the matter already existed when the strong hand of the head of the family or tribe insisted on a fair distribution of food. Specht (p. 11) speaks of the bones of sacrifices as “the oldest approaches to a sort of writing”, and of course, the bones on the family plates, so to speak, were as truly records of the parts assigned to them, so far as they went (and if their portions had bones) as the bones of sacrifices! But then there is of course the farther question: Did the first savage who denied himself for the sake of one of the weak not have the religious motive, and did not the first man who forced a tribe of his fellows to do the same, need to use the religious sanction and invoke the fear of God as well as of his own right arm? And then, equally of course, there is the farther question whether the first man was a savage at all.

In the golden age before the mild and carnivorous Abel, before even his fruitiverous and murderous older brother, before the Fall when all were still fruit eaters and fruit eaters only, the tabu was—religious prohibition and religious sanction. And that tabu was on the apples of Iduna, the fruit of the tree of knowledge between good and evil, which springs from the fountains of memory and reflection,—the golden apples of strife which some say give immortality, some death. What is this tree whose fruit is tangible knowledge, the food of the gods and which was in the beginning with the first man, but a library, and what did those old philosophizers mean by what they set down about the first man and the way they put it? Did they mean that what is food for one is poison for another or simply that to break tabu spells death whether it is body food tabu or mind food tabu? Truth to tell the germ of the library is as early as man’s mind—at least.

Back to this point, the beginning of man, we have actual literary “authority” in the person of Specht at least, and nearly back to this point we have good archaeological sources for our collections of written records. There is, however, no authority in literature or in the sources, so far as this lecturer knows, for carrying conjecture back into the territory of the pithecanthropos, who, however, must have made and left similar involuntary records of his gastronomic activities, but who presumably never observed them or appointed them for memorial purposes.

§ 19. _The administration of primitive libraries_

The question of where and by whom and how books were kept and made ready for users is not one that has been very much discussed although the questions who were the librarians and where were the books kept has been more or less implied in the discussions of temple versus secular collections. Mr. Tedder’s dictum that “these records would naturally be preserved in sacred places, and accordingly the earliest libraries of the world were probably temples and the earliest librarians priests” is modified and perhaps at the same time confirmed by the history of pre-phonetic libraries. It is true that in primitive tribes the medicine man is generally a keeper of records, but it is true also that among the Mexican Indians certainly, and pretty clearly among North American Indian tribes and in many African tribes, the shaman or medicine man is not the only keeper of records. It is true also that in the early Egyptian practice the priests were the keepers of the books whether it was in the temple, archives or the palace archives, but even here it seems to be the fact that there were military records, department records, and local administrative records in the different nomes kept by scribes who were not priests.

The keeping of records must in fact have begun before there was any special place, even the simplest hut or medicine wigwam or cave, set apart for distinctively religious purposes, although the setting apart of such places is apparently as old as the caves of the Stone Age. With these qualifications, the history of votive offerings tends to confirm the statement that the earliest public or tribal libraries were religious and the corresponding librarians the priests.

In very early times, and in much later times among primitive peoples, even the art of writing itself was often kept as a secret mystery in the custody of priests. The name “hieroglyphics” points in this same direction, and the temple collections of sacred books, the so-called books of Thoth and books of Hermes, point in the same direction. In general, however, this monopoly of letters seems rather to have been a deliberate assumption by the priests, as it is sometimes assumed by savage royalty, rather than the original situation. It applies, of course, rather to newly devised kinds of symbols, such as the vast number of systems of secret writing which have been evolved in all ages, than to the ordinary current record methods. That some of the earliest libraries were secret libraries, however, is an interesting fact, and one which may throw light on the mysterious collections of shrines and portable collections of objects in the liturgical processions in Egypt.

The methods used by these priest librarians for keeping and using the books form in themselves an interesting and little studied subject of very considerable extent.

The different kinds of writing required different sorts of receptacles. The book chest or bookcase, from which has come through the Greek the common word for library in languages other than English, was the most universal and natural way of keeping almost every kind of tangible record. The wooden chests and clay chests of the earliest historical periods must have extended well back into the pre-phonetic period and have also been found among primitive and semi-civilized peoples. They can obviously be used for quipus, message sticks, or almost any portable document. The same is true of the clay jar so often used in the earliest historical period. In the case of wandering tribes, however, less rigid or fragile materials are certainly better, and the book pouch was, therefore, in very early, and probably much earlier use than either boxes or jars. The skin pouch, like the skin water jar, is naturally suggested and easily made. This early form survives in the medicine bag, the lawyer’s green bag, and the schoolboy’s bag as well as in mail pouches for post-office use.

The use of basketry work and perhaps other textile work as bookcase also certainly extended back into pre-phonetic times and is represented in primitive usage.

It is not to be supposed, of course, that in these primitive times there were often separate buildings, such as the later Greek treasuries, or even separate rooms as in the Egyptian temples, and the archives at Boghaz Keuei and elsewhere, although separate huts for these and especially for “collections of liturgical objects” would perhaps be almost the first use for covered rooms, while sacrificing was still conducted in the open air.

Something like a pouch or wallet must have been used for the marked pebbles of the Stone Age and for pebble counting generally before the grooves and rods of the abacus were invented.

The method of keeping and displaying the books in the boxes, pouches, rooms or buildings, varied of course according to the nature of the document. In the modern library there is a great difference between the machinery necessary to keep and display folded documents, rolled documents, and ordinary bound books. The pouch may have had compartments like a modern purse. Basketry, clay and wood cases did have compartments, one for each roll, in quite early papyrus days.

In some of the late Babylonian libraries the clay tablets were evidently displayed on shelves but they were more commonly kept in clay boxes or jars, alabaster boxes, and the like, after the general fashion of the treasuries in earlier times and until the quantity became great. Twig records were tied together in bundles, and the stringing together of records was one of the earliest and most extensively used methods. It may perhaps be said that it was the typical method of the earliest records. It is found in the stringing together of trophy objects for wearing on the person—necklaces, girdles, and draped strings of various trophies. It is found also early in the history of the abacus where the perforated pebbles or beads were strung on different rods set in the ground, and it is of course found in the developed abacus. The perforations of tablets, bearing the year marks, among the objects from the earliest dynasties at Abydos, suggest a stringing together of these annual records, although it is of course possible that these are labels and the perforations used to attach them to boxes. The analogy with annual records of primitive people, however, suggests this stringing together.

What may be called classification of these libraries is found very early. It is reflected perhaps in the early distinction between temple and palace libraries, and more clearly in the primitive distinction between shamans and secular recorders. The putting of like kinds of works in boxes together, medical works, etc., is found as early as 2700 B.C. in Egypt and quite early in Crete. The labels of Crete point to a classification of objects if not of object records.

When collections are small no cataloguing is necessary excepting in the librarian’s mind, and his first mnemonic aid is classification, which is in fact a sort of cataloguing and takes the place of all other cataloguing. It is to be noted that in the very earliest records the librarian goes with the king or the investigating committee when they go to look up the records.

§ 20. _The beginnings of library schools_

The library school is commonly regarded as, and is, in a sense, a product of the last century. Library schools are, therefore, still a new thing. It may not seem so to you who had not been born when some of us were lecturing at that first American library school up at Columbia University, but it is the fact that the teachers of that school are still living and teaching, and there were no schools of library economy strictly speaking when they began. The well fledged library school as an avowed school and independent unit is a product of this generation.

Nevertheless library schools too have had their beginnings. In the immediate past schools or university courses of palaeography or archival science have been practically library schools. In European countries, where the handling of documents and manuscripts have been so much the more difficult share of the problem that library economy and all the rest has been counted negligible and has in fact been neglected, these were real library schools, in that they were chiefly or wholly intended for and used by those who were intending to be librarians. They taught in fact the things which were most expected of the librarians, just as the modern schools, in teaching almost exclusively business and administrative methods, teach the things which the moderns expect of their librarians. They were and are, therefore, very one-sided library schools, lopsided on the science side, and yet perhaps not more lopsided than our own schools are on the side of library economy.

But the beginnings of library schools may be found farther back still in the schools of the Scriptoria of the middle ages, where librarians made as well as kept their books, and in the temple schools of Greece and Egypt, where men were trained to all sorts of professions, including the keeping of books. Such schools are alleged in Babylonia as early as 3200 B.C., and more primitive still must be counted the schools for the training in memorizing of ancient India. That some analogies to this training in the keeping of books existed in the collections of mnemonic books is not merely inferred in general but found in the alleged training of keepers of quipus in the use and publication of these records. The same is possibly true in some of the initiation ceremonies of primitive tribes where the young men are presumably taught the use of message sticks, secret languages, and the like. It may fairly be said that these are remote in nature as well as in time, and yet they are as truly the predecessors of the library schools of to-day, as these of to-day are of the library schools of to-morrow, which are likely to differ very considerably from those of to-day.

It does not take much of a prophet to foresee a radical development in some of our American library schools within a very few years. When for example, the Columbia Library school was starting, manuscripts were so few in this country that their science and economy was a negligible element in instruction—and as for archives, we had plenty of documents but the very name archive, with what it connotes, was foreign and almost unknown in America. Now there are many well recognized archives and some of our collections of ancient manuscripts are numbered by the thousands. Many of you will probably live to see more than one library school equipped with full departments for instruction in palaeography and archival science, with special curricula for each distinguished from the general course in library economy. Possibly by that time there will also be departments of cartography, engraving and numismatics, each with its corps of instructors. In these respects it was something of a pity that the library school went out of the university, but on the whole it may be doubted if it would have ever had the great expansion or ever have done the great work that it has done for popular education if it had stayed in the university. In several very fundamental respects certainly this New York Public Library is a far better environment for developing a university of librarianship than any university of general studies.

§ 21. _The beginnings of library research_

What we have been saying to-day is only the rough blocking out of a subject for which anthropology and the excavations in the eastern Mediterranean region have furnished and are furnishing an enormous amount of source material, as yet wholly unexplored for library matters. A small part of the material has indeed been roughly explored and has yielded rich results in fields where there was absolutely nothing known before, but the unexplored matter is large and increasing rapidly every day. Library research it may fairly be said is itself in its beginnings, and American research in libraries for the older periods hardly yet begun. Of course, as we know Aristotle had some faint notion of anthropological methods and all the mythologizing people were, as is very thoroughly recognized now, pursuing a sort of scientific research and expressing and thinking in these figures of speech. In this point of view the myths as to Hermes and Thoth, Seshait and Minerva were, if not research, at least speculation on the origins.

Research, however, as now understood, is the product of modern natural science and goes hand in hand with the doctrine of evolution. In this sense there has already been much good research work in palaeography and other branches of the book sciences in European countries. In America a little real scientific work has been done in palaeography, more in the history of printing and a trifle in some other branches of library science, but the total is small and little or none of it directly connected with the library school. It is likely, however, that in the near future many of the library schools will be teaching methods of research and giving diplomas which require some real contribution. Possibly they will even have recognized departments for research. Of this movement you will be a part and the character of the development will be in part, possibly in large part, through what you think and do and become during your course here. Probably we have as little notion of what record keeping will be a few thousands of years hence, as the inventor of the knotted cord had of this library school—and yet what we do may perhaps affect the state of things then as the inventor of the quipu, the alphabet, papyrus, vellum, printing, the photograph, phonograph, or any of the great inventions in the evolution of books and their keeping, has affected the present state of things.

§ 22. _Bibliography_

The best first source for a general idea of primitive libraries is the readable and well illustrated little book of Edward Clodd called _The story of the alphabet_, (N. Y., Appleton, 1912).

With this may be put the still briefer first part of Dr. Fritz Specht’s _Die schrift_ (Berlin, 1909. 3rd ed.).

More extensive general treatments are found in Berger’s _Histoire_ (Paris, 1892), and quite exhaustively in Wuttke’s _Die entstehung der schrift_ (Leipzig, 1872), also in W. J. Hoffmann’s _The beginnings of writing_ (N. Y., 1895), a sketchy but comprehensive survey.

For the definition of the library see Graesse Schmidt and the other treatises on library science, especially the older ones.

For libraries of the gods see the various works on comparative mythology under the topics of the various writing gods, Hermes, Thoth, Odin, etc., or better, since the subject has not been very much worked up, in the sources The Eddas, The Book of the Dead, The Avesta and for the Indian matters Muir’s _Sanskrit texts_.

In the matter of antediluvian libraries see the references in Schmidt and Richardson, but especially the sources gathered as pseudepigraphic literature of the Old Testament first by Fabricius but now to be had in more modern editions.

For animal, plant and memory libraries see the literature of so called “Comparative psychology” given in admirable detail annually in the Psychological index—looking up the articles on inward speech and writing as well as on memory.

For Preadamites see Winchell’s _Preadamites_ (Chicago, 1880), and the works of M’Causland.

For prehistoric and borderland libraries generally in the Mediterranean region the various works of Mosso may be consulted, especially the _Dawn of Mediterranean civilisation_, ch. 2, pp. 11-43, “The Origin of Writing,” and still better, Evans’ _Scripta Minoa_ which is a classic.

For prehistoric western Europe, J. Déchelette’s _Manuel d’archéologie prehistorique Celtique et Gallo-Romaine_, v. 1., (Paris, 1908), is most comprehensive for a first survey of a very extensive field.

In the matter of primitive tribes Frobenius’ _Childhood of man_ (Philadelphia, 1909), although curiously sketchy and aggravatingly brief, seems to be authoritative enough, and certainly gives the layman in these matters a good idea in short space of the anthropological aspects of the subject.

One of the very best sources easily accessible to all for getting first clear impressions as to the use for record by primitive man of all the prephonetic methods of record is F. W. Hodge, _Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico_. Smithsonian Institute, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 30, Pt. 1 and 2. 59th Congress, 1st Session, House Documents v. 61 and 62. Among the many articles some of the best, but by no means the only useful ones, are the following: Adornment, Calumet, Color symbolism, Dramatic representations, Engraving, Featherwork, Fetish, Hairdressing, Knots, Labrets, Mourning, Ornament, Painting, Pictographs, Prayer sticks, Quillwork, Scalping, Shrines, Sign language, Signals, Tattooing, Totem poles, Wampum.

Add to this for the African tribes Miss Kingsley’s _West Africa_ and Dennett’s _At the back of the Black Man’s mind_.

For the enormous literature on tattooing see the list of hundreds of books and articles in the catalogue of the Library of the U. S. Surgeon General’s Office.

For the quipu an article by L. Leland Locke on _The ancient Quipu, a Peruvian knot record_ is given in the American Anthropologist v. 14, 1912, pp. 325-32. This gives a modern point of view, has excellent illustrations and its author promises a bibliography of the extensive literature immediately.

For message sticks there is a long chapter with illustrations in A. W. Howitt, _The native tribes of South East Australia_ (London, 1904, pp. 691-710).

An accessible first reference for pebble records and the abacus is the chapter on systems of numeration in W. W. R. Ball’s _History of mathematics_ (London, 1888), pp. 114-19, also, and perhaps even better, J. Gow’s _A short history of Greek mathematics_ (Cambridge, 1884), pp. 26-40. Cf. also article on the abacus in the Pauly-Wissowa Encyclopedia.

In the matter of the votive offerings W. H. D. Rouse’s _Greek Votive Offerings_ (Cambridge, 1902), is a most suggestive and readable, while detailed and scholarly book.

On the Orphic tablets, see appendix to Miss Harrison’s _Prolegomena to the study of Greek religion_ (Cambridge, 1903), pp. 660-74, and text passim,—the text being one of the classics of modern comparative religion.

_The end_