CHAPTER XII.

PICTURE-WRITING.

[Sidenote: Lateness of the discovery of letters.]

Though it is true, as we have said before, that every manufactured article involves a long chapter of unwritten history to account for its present form, and the perfection of the material from which it is wrought, there is no one of them, not the most artistic, that will so well repay an effort to hunt it through its metamorphoses in the ages to its first starting-point, as will the letters that rapidly drop from our pen when we proceed to write its name. Each one of these is a manufactured article at which a long, long series of unknown artists have wrought, expanding, contracting, shaping, pruning, till at length, the result of centuries of effort, our alphabet stands clear--a little army of mute, unpretending signs, that are at once the least considered of our inherited riches--mere jots and tittles--and the spells by which all our great feats of genius are called into being. Does unwritten history or tradition tell us anything of the people to whose invention we owe them? or, on the other hand, can we persuade the little shapes with which we are familiar to so animate themselves, and give such an account of the stages by which they grew into their present likeness, as will help us to understand better than we did before the mental and social conditions of the times of their birth? One question, at least, they answer clearly--we know that while in their earliest forms they must have preceded the birth of History, they were the forerunners and heralds of his appearance, and if we are obliged to relegate their invention to the dark period of unrecorded events, we must place it at least in the last of the twilight hours, the one that preceded daybreak, for they come leading sunlight and certainty behind them. It will be hard if these revealers of other births should prove to be entirely silent about their own. Another point seems to grow clear as we think. As letters are the elements by which records come to us, it is not in records, or at least not in early records, that we must look for a history of their invention. Like all other tools, they will have lent themselves silently to the ends for which they were called into being. For a long, long time, they will have been too busy giving the history of their employers to tell us consciously anything about themselves. We must leave the substance of records, then, and look to their manner and form, if we would unravel the long story of the invention and growth of our alphabet; and as it is easiest to begin with the thing that is nearest to us, let us pause before one of our written words, and ask ourselves exactly what it is to us.

[Sidenote: Writing the art of picturing sound.]

In discussing the growth of language, we surmised that words were at first descriptive of the things they named, in fact, pictures to the ear. What, then, is a written word? Is it, too, a picture, and what does it picture, to the eye? When we have written the words _cat_, _man_, _lion_, what have we done? We have brought the images of certain things into our minds, and that by a form presented to the eye; but is it the form of the object we immediately think of? No, it is the form of its name; it is, therefore, the picture of a sound. To picture _sound_ is, surely, a very far-fetched notion, one that may have grown out of many previous efforts to convey thought from mind to mind; but certainly not likely to occur first to those who began the attempt to give permanent shape to the thoughts floating within them. So great and difficult a task must have baffled the powers of many enterprisers, and been approached in many ways before the first steps towards accomplishing it were securely taken. We shall find that the history of our alphabet is a record of slow stages of growth, through which the idea of sound-writing has been evolved; the first attempts to record events were made in a different direction. Since, as we have agreed, we are not likely to find a record of how events were first recorded, and as the earliest attempts are likely to have been imperfect and little durable, we must be content to form our notions of the earliest stage in our grand invention, by observing the methods used by savages now to aid their memories; and if we wish to determine the period in the history of the human race when such efforts are likely to have been first made, we must recall what we have already learned of the history of primitive man, and settle at what stage of his development the need for artificial aids to memory would first press upon him.

Stories and poetry are not likely to have been the first things written down. While communities were small and young, there was no need to write painfully what it was so delightful to repeat from mouth to mouth, and so easy for memories to retain; and when the stock of tradition and the treasure of song grew so large in any tribe as to exceed the capacity of ordinary memories (stronger, in some respects, before the invention of writing than now), men with unusual gifts would be chosen and set apart for the purpose of remembering and reciting, and of handing down to disciples in the next generation, the precious literature of the tribe. Such an order of ‘remembrancers’ would soon come to be looked upon as sacred, or at least highly honourable, and would have privileges and immunities bestowed on them which would make them jealous of an invention that would lessen the worth of their special gift. The invention of writing, then, is hardly likely to have come from the story-tellers or bards. It was probably to aid the memory in recalling something less attractive and more secret than a story or a song that the first record was made.

So early as the time of the cave-dwellers, there was a beginning of commerce. Traces have been found of workshops belonging to that period, where flint weapons and tools were made in such quantities as evidently to have been designed for purposes of barter, and the presence of amber and shells in places far from the coast, speaks of trading journeys. With bargains and exchange of commodities, aids to memory must surely have come in; and when we think of the men of the Neolithic age as traders, we can hardly be wrong in also believing them to have taken the next step in civilization which trade seems to bring with it--the invention of some system of mnemonics.

[Sidenote: Tallies.]

No man or woman would be likely to trust their bargaining to another without giving him some little token or pledge by way of safeguard against mistake or forgetfulness. It would be a very trifling, transitory thing at first; something in the nature of a tally, or a succession of knots or woven threads in a garment, allied to the knot which we tie on our handkerchief overnight to make us remember something in the morning. It seems hardly worthy of notice, and yet the invention of that artificial aid to memory is the germ of writing, the little seed from which such great things have come. Unfortunately, our discoveries of stone-age relics have not yet furnished us with any suggestion as to how the men of that epoch arranged and carried out the aids to memory they probably had; but we can trace the process of invention among still extant races.

Some tribes of Red Indians, for example, keep records on cords called wampum, by means of beads and knots. When an embassy is sent from one chieftain to another, the principal speaker carries one of these pieces of wampum, and from it reads off the articles of the proposed treaty, almost as easily as if it were from a note-book.

In the Eastern Archipelago, and in Polynesia proper, cord-records of the same kind were in use forty years ago, and by means of them the tax-gatherers in the island of Hawaii kept clear accounts of all articles collected from the inhabitants of the island. The revenue-book of Hawaii was a rope four hundred fathoms long, divided into portions corresponding to districts in the island, and each portion was under the care of a tax-gatherer, who by means of knots, loops, and tufts of different shapes, colours, and sizes, managed to keep an accurate account of the number of hogs, dogs, pieces of sandal-wood, etc., at which each inhabitant of his district was rated. The Chinese, again, have a legend that in very early times their people used little cords marked by knots of different sizes, instead of writing.

But the people who brought the cord system of mnemonics to the greatest perfection were the Peruvians. They were still following it at the time of their conquest by the Spaniards; but they had elaborated it with such care as to make it available for the preservation of even minute details of the statistics of the country. The ropes on which they kept their records were called _quipus_, from _quipu_, a knot. They were often of great length and thickness, and from the main ropes depended smaller ones, distinguished by colours appropriate to subjects of which their knots treated--as, white for silver, yellow for gold, red for soldiers, green for corn, parti-coloured when a subject that required division was treated of. These dependent coloured strings had, again, other little strings hanging from them, and on these exceptions were noted. For instance, on the _quipus_ devoted to population--the coloured strings on which the number of men in each town and village was recorded had depending from them little strings for the widowers, and no doubt the widows and the old maids had their little strings from the coloured cord that denoted women. One knot meant ten; a double knot, one hundred; two singles, side by side, twenty; two doubles, two hundred; and the position of the knots on their string and their form were also of immense importance, each subject having its proper place on the quipus and its proper form of knot. The art of learning to read quipus must have been difficult to acquire; it was practised by special functionaries, called quipucamayocuna, or knot-officers, who, however, seem only to have been able to expound their own records; for when a quipus was sent from a distant province to the capital, its own officer had to travel with it to explain it; a clumsy and cumbrous way of sending a letter, it must be confessed.

Knot-records were almost everywhere superseded by other methods of recording events as civilization advanced; but still they continued to be resorted to under special circumstances, and by people who had not the pens of ready writers. Darius made a quipus when he took a thong, and tying sixty knots on it, gave it to the Ionian chiefs, that they might untie a knot every day, and go back to their own land if he had not returned when all the knots were undone. The Scythians, however, who, about the same time, sent a message to Darius, afford us an example of another way of attaching special meanings to certain objects, and thereby giving a peculiar use as aids to memory,--writing letters with objects instead of pen and ink, in fact. Here, however, symbolism comes in, and makes the mnemonics at once prettier and less trustworthy as capable of more than one interpretation. The Scythian ambassadors presented Darius (as Herodotus tells us) with a mouse, a bird, a frog, and an arrow, and the message with which they had been intrusted was that, unless he could hide in the earth like a mouse, or fly in the air like a bird, or swim in water like a frog, he would never escape the arrows of the Scythians.

Of this last kind of mnemonic was the bow, too heavy for an ordinary man to bend, which the long-lived Ethiopians sent to Cambyses; and the twelve memorial stones which Joshua was directed to place in the river Jordan, in order that the sons might ask the fathers, and the fathers tell the sons what had happened in that place; and, again, such were the yokes and bonds which Jeremiah put round his neck when he testified against the alliance with Egypt before Zedekiah, and the earthen pot that he broke in the presence of the elders of the people. Signs joined with words and actions to convey a fuller or more exact meaning than words alone could convey. Perhaps we ought hardly to call these last examples helps to memory; they partake more of the nature of pictures, and were used to heighten the effect of words. But we may regard them as a connecting link between the merely mechanical tally, wampum and quipus, and the effort to record ideas we must now consider--picturing. It must, however, always be borne in mind that, though we shall speak of these various methods of making records as stages of progress and development, it is not to be supposed that the later ones immediately, or indeed ever wholly, superseded the first any more than the introduction of bronze and iron did away with the use of flint weapons. The one method subsisted side by side with the other, and survived to quite late times, as we see in such usages as the bearing forth of the fiery cross to summon clansmen to the banner of their chieftain, and the casting down of the knight’s glove as a gage of battle, or, to come down to homely modern instances, the tallies and knots on handkerchiefs that unready writers carry to help their memories even now.

Helps to memory of the kinds which we have been speaking of never get beyond being _helps_. They cannot carry thought from one to another without the intervention of an interpreter, in whose memory they keep fast the words that have to be said; they strengthen tradition, but they cannot change tradition into history, and are always liable to become useless by the death of the man, or order of men, to whom they have been intrusted.

[Sidenote: Picturing.]

A more independent and lasting method of recording events was sure to be aimed at sooner or later; and we may conjecture that it usually took its rise among a people at the period when their national pride was so developed as to make them anxious that the deeds of some conspicuous hero should be made known, not only to those interested in telling and hearing of them, but to strangers visiting their country, and to remote descendants. Their first effort to record an event, so as to make it widely known, would naturally be to draw a picture of it, such that all seeing the picture would understand it; and accordingly we find that the earliest step beyond artificial helps to memory is the making of rude pictures which aim at showing a deed or event as it occurred without suggesting the words of a narrative; this is called ‘picturing’ as distinguished from picture-writing. That this, too, was a very early art we may guess from the fact that rude pictures of animals have been found among the relics of the earliest stone age. Whether or no we are justified in conjecturing that the pictures actually found are rough memorials of real hunting scenes, at least we learn from them that the thought of depicting objects had come, and the skill to produce a likeness been attained; and the idea of using this power to transmit events lies so near to its possession, that we can hardly believe one to have been long present without the other. To enable ourselves to imagine the sort of picture-records with which the stone-age men may have ornamented some of their knives, spears, and hammers, we must examine the doings of people who have continued in a primitive stage of civilization down to historic times.

Some curious pictures done by North American Indians have been found on rocks and stones, and on the stems of pine-trees in America, which furnish excellent examples of early picturing. Mr. Tylor, in his _Early History of Mankind_, gives engravings of several of these shadowy records of long-past events. One of these, which was found on the smoothed surface of a pine-tree, consists merely of a rude outline of two canoes, one surmounted by a bear with a peculiar tail and the other by a fish, and beyond these a quantity of shapes meant for a particular kind of fish. The entire picture records the successes of two chieftains named Copper-tail Bear and Cat-fish, in a fishing excursion. Another picture found on the surface of a rock near Lake Superior is more elaborate, and interests us by showing a new element in picturing, through which it was destined to grow into the condition of picture-writing. This more elaborate picture shows an arch with three suns in it--a tortoise, a man about to mount a horse, and several canoes, one surmounted by the image of a bird. All this tells that the chief called King-fisher made an expedition of three days across a lake, and arriving safely on land, mounted his horse. The new element introduced into this picture is symbolism, the same that transformed the homely system of tallies into the Scythian’s graceful living message to Darius. It shows the excess of thought over the power of expression, which will soon necessitate a new form. The tortoise is used as a symbol of dry land. The arch is, of course, the sky, and the three suns in it mean three days. The artist who devised these ways of expressing his thought was on the verge of picture-writing, which is the next stage in the upward progress of the art of recording events, and the stage at which some nations have terminated their efforts.

[Sidenote: Picture-writing.]

Picture-writing differs from picturing in that it aims at conveying to the mind, not a representation of an event, but a narrative of the event in words, each word being represented by a picture. The distinction is of immense importance. The step from the former to the latter is one of the greatest which mankind has ever made in the course of its progress in civilization. When the step had been made the road toward the acquisition of a regular alphabet lay _comparatively_ open. It was still beset with difficulties, but none so great as the difficulty of making this particular step. Let us try and fully understand this. We will take a sentence and see how it might be conveyed by the two methods. _A man slew a lion with a bow and arrows while the sun went down._ Picturing would show the man with a drawn bow in his hand, the lion struck by the arrow, the sun on the horizon. Picture-writing would present a series of little pictures and symbols dealing separately with each word--a man, a symbol for ‘slew,’ say a hand smiting, a lion, a connecting symbol for ‘with,’ and so on. We see at once how much more elaborate and exact the second method is, and that it makes the telling of a continuous story possible. We also discover that these various stages of writing correspond to developments of language, and that as languages grow in capacity to express nobler thoughts, a greater stress will be put upon invention to render the more recondite words by pictures and symbols, till at last language will outgrow all possibility of being so rendered, and another method of showing words to the eye will have to be thought of--for all languages at least that attain their full development. That a great deal may be expressed by pictures and symbols, however, we learn from the picturing and picture-writing of past races that have come down to us, and from the present writing of the Chinese, who with their radical language have preserved the pictorial character that well accords with an early stage of language.

The Red Indians of North America have invented some very ingenious methods of picturing time and numbers. They have names for the thirteen moons or months into which they divide the year--Whirlwind moon, moon when the leaves fall off, moon when the fowls go to the south, etc., and when a hunter setting forth on a long expedition wished to leave a record of the time of his departure for a friend who should follow him on the same track, he carved on the bark of a tree a picture of the name of the moon, accompanied with such an exact representation of the state of the moon in the heavens on the night when he set out, that his friends had no difficulty in reading the date correctly. The Indians of Virginia kept a record of events in the form of a series of wheels of sixty spokes, each wheel representing the life of a man, sixty years being the average life of a man among the Indians. The spokes meant years, and on each one a picture of the principal occurrences of the year was drawn.

A missionary who accompanied Penn to Pennsylvania says that he saw a wheel, on one spoke of which the first arrival of Europeans in America was recorded. The history of this disastrous event for the Indians was given by a picture of a white swan spitting fire from its mouth. The swan, being a water-bird, told that the strangers came over the sea, its white plumage recalled the colour of their faces, and fire issuing from its mouth represented fire-arms, the possession of which had made them conquerors. The North American Indians also use rude little pictures, rough writing we may call it, to help them to remember songs and charms. Each verse of a song is concentrated into a little picture, the sight of which recalls the words to one who has once learned it. A drawing of a little man, with four marks on his legs and two on his breast, recalls the adverse charm, ‘Two days must you fast, my friend, four days must you sit still.’ A picture of a circle with a figure in the middle represents a verse of a love-song, and says to the initiated, ‘Were she on a distant island I could make her swim over.’ This sort of picturing seems to be very _near_ writing, for it serves to recall words--but still only to recall them--it would not suggest the words to those who had never heard the song before; it is only an aid to memory, and its employers have only as yet taken the first step in the great discovery we are speaking of. The Mexicans, though they had attained to much greater skill than this in the drawing and colouring of pictures, had not progressed much further in the invention. Their picture-scrolls do not seem ever to have been more than an elaborate system of mnemonics, which, hardly less than the Peruvian quipus, required a race of interpreters to hand down their meaning from one generation to another. This fact makes us regret somewhat less keenly the decision of the first Spanish archbishop sent to Mexico, who, on being informed of the great store of vellum rolls, and folds on folds of cloth covered with paintings, that had been discovered at Anahuac, the chief seat of Mexican learning, ordered the entire collection to be burnt in a heap--a _mountain_ heap, the chroniclers of the time call it--lest they should contain incantations or instructions for the practice of magical arts. As some excuse for this notion of the archbishop’s, we will mention the subjects treated of in the five books of picture-writing which Montezuma gave to Cortez:--the first book treated of years and seasons; the second of days and festivals; the third of dreams and omens; the fourth of the naming of children; the fifth of ceremonies and prognostications.

The few specimens of Mexican writing which have come down to us, show that, though the Aztecs had not used their picture-signs as skilfully as some other nations have done, they had taken the first step towards phonetic, or sound-writing; a step which, if pursued, would have led them through some such process as we shall afterwards see was followed by the Egyptians and Phœnicians, to the formation of a true alphabet. They had begun to write proper names of chiefs and towns by pictures of things that recalled the _sound_ of their names, instead of by a symbol suggestive of the appearance or quality of the place or chieftain, or of the _meaning_ of the names. It is difficult to explain this without pictures; but as this change of method involves a most important step in the discovery of the art of writing, we had better pause upon it a little, and get it clear to our minds. There was a king whose name occurs in a chronicle now existing, called Itz-co-atle, Knife-snake; his name is generally written by a picture of a snake, with flint knives stuck in it; but in one place it is indicated in a different manner. The first syllable is still _pictured_ by a knife; but for the second, instead of a snake, we find an earthen pot and a sign for water. Now the Mexican name for pot is ‘co-mitle,’ for water ‘atle;’ read literally the name thus pictured would read ‘Itz-comitle-atle,’ but it is clear, since the name intended was ‘Itz-co-atle,’ that the pot is drawn to suggest only the first syllable of its name, _co_, and by this change it has become no longer a picture, but a phonetic, syllabic sign, the next step but one before a true letter. What great results can be elaborated from this change we shall see when we begin to speak of Egyptian writing.

We must not leave picture-writing till we have said something about the Chinese character, in which we find the highest development of which _direct_ representation of things appears capable. Though we should not think it, while looking at the characters on a Chinese tea-paper or box, every one of those groups of black strokes and dots which seem so shapeless to our eyes is a picture of an object; not a picture of the sound of its name, as our written words are, but a representation real or symbolic of the thing itself. Early specimens of Chinese writing show these groups of strokes in a stage when a greater degree of resemblance to the thing signified is preserved; but the exigencies of quick writing, among a people who write and read a great deal, have gradually reduced the pictures more and more to the condition of arbitrary signs, whose connection with the things signified must be a matter of habit and memory. The task of learning a sign for every word of the language in place of conquering the art of spelling does seem, at first sight, to put Chinese children in a pitiable condition, as compared with ourselves. To lessen our compassion, we may recall that the Chinese language is still in a primitive condition, and therefore comprehends very much fewer distinct sounds than do the languages we know, the same sound being used to express meanings by a difference in intonation. This difference could not easily be given in writing; it is therefore, with the Chinese, almost a necessity to recall to the mind the thing itself instead of its name.

[Sidenote: Ideographs.]

Beside the ordinary pictorial signs which convey a direct and simple idea to the mind, men must in pictorial writing need a great number of signs for ideas which cannot be pictured. All abstract ideas, for instance, come under this head. But even some things which could themselves be drawn are not always so portrayed. When a symbol, and not a direct picture, is used for the thing or idea represented we call the symbol an _ideograph_. We see, then, that pictorial signs may be used in several different ways, sometimes as real pictures, sometimes as ideographs, which again may be divided into groups as they are used--(1) metaphorically, as a bee for industry; (2) enigmatically, as, among the Egyptians, an ostrich feather is used as a symbol of justice, because all the plumes in the wing of this bird were supposed to be of equal length; (3) by syndoche--putting a part for the whole,--as two eyeballs for eyes; (4) by metonomy--putting cause for effect,--as a tree for shadow; the disk of the sun for a day, etc. This system of writing in pictures and symbols requires so much ingenuity, such hosts of pretty poetic inventions, that perhaps there is less dulness than would at first appear in getting the Chinese alphabet of some six thousand signs or so by heart. We will mention a few Chinese ideographs in illustration. The sign for a man placed over the sign for a mountain peak signifies a hermit; the sign for a mouth and that for a bird placed side by side signify the act of singing; a hand holding a sweeping-brush is a woman; a man seated on the ground, a son (showing the respectful position assigned to children in China); an ear at the opening of a door means curiosity; two eyes squinting towards the nose mean to observe carefully; one eye squinting symbolises the colour white, because so much of the white of the eye is shown when the ball is in that position; a mouth at an open door is a note of interrogation, and also the verb to question.

[Sidenote: Determinative signs.]

Even Chinese writing, however, has not remained purely ideographic. Some of the signs are used phonetically to picture sound, and this use must necessarily grow now that intercourse with Western nations introduces new names, new inventions, and new ideas, which, somehow or other, must get themselves represented in the Chinese language and writing.

The invention of determinative signs--characters put beside the word to show what class of objects a word belongs to--helps the Chinese to overcome some of the difficulties which their radical language offers to the introduction of sound-writing. For example, the word ‘Pa’ has eight different meanings, and when it is written phonetically, a reader would have to choose between eight objects to which he might apply it, if there were not a determinative sign by its side which gives him a hint how to read it. This is as if when we wrote the word ‘vessel’ we were to add ‘navigation’ when we intended a ship; and ‘household’ when we meant a jug or puncheon. The Chinese determinative signs are not, however, left to each writer’s fancy. Two hundred and fourteen signs (originally themselves pictures, remember) have been chosen out, and are always used in this way. The classes into which objects are divided by these numerous signs are minute, and do not appear to follow any scientific method or arrangement. There is a sign to show that a written word belongs to the class noses, another for rats, another for frogs, another for tortoises. One is inclined to think that the helpful signs must be as hard to remember as the words themselves, and that they can only be another element in the general confusion. Probably their frequent recurrence makes them soon become familiar to Chinese readers, and they act as finger-posts to guide the thoughts into the right direction. Determinative signs have always come in to help in the transitional stage between purely ideographic and purely phonetic writing, and were used by both Egyptians and Assyrians in their elaborate systems as soon as the phonetic principle began to be employed among their ideographs.

It is an interesting fact that the Japanese have dealt with the Chinese system of writing precisely as did the Phœnicians with the Egyptian hieroglyphics. They have chosen forty-seven signs from the many thousands employed by the Chinese, and they use them phonetically only; that is to say, as true sound-carrying letters.