CHAPTER VI

ON PREHISTORIC CULTURE

It has been said that history proper is usually regarded as having to do solely with the deeds of civilised man, but in point of fact the scope of history as written at the present day necessarily falls far short of comprehending the entire history of civilisation. Before the dawn of recorded history man had evolved to a stage in which the greater number of the greatest arts had been attained. That is to say, he was possessed of articulate language. He had learned to clothe and to house himself. He knew the use of fire. He could manufacture implements of war and of peace. He had surrounded himself with domesticated animals. He added to his food supply by practising agriculture. He had established systems of government. He knew how to embellish his surroundings by the practice of painting and of decorative architecture, and last, and perhaps greatest, he had invented the art of writing, and carried it far toward perfection.

With the development of these arts history proper is not concerned, but this is not because the development of these arts would not constitute true history if its course were known, but simply because of our entire ignorance of all details of the subject.

In order to gain a clearer idea, however, of the status of human culture at the dawn of history proper, it may be worth while to glance in the most cursory way at each of the great inventions and developments upon which the entire structure of civilisation depends.

_First. Language._

Perhaps the greatest single step ever made in the history of man’s upward progress was taken when the practice of articulate speech began. It would be contrary to all that we know of human evolution to suppose that this development was a sudden one, or that it transformed a non-human into a human species at a sudden vault. It is well known that many of the lower animals are able to communicate with one another in a way that implies at least a vague form of speech, and it has been questioned whether the higher species of apes do not actually articulate in a way strictly comparable to the vocalisation of man. Be that as it may, the clear fact remains that one species of animal did at a very remote time in the past develop the power of vocalisation in the direction of articulate speech to a degree that in course of time broadened the gap between that species and all others, till it became an impassable chasm.

Without language of an explicit kind not even the rudiments of civilisation would be possible. No one perhaps ever epitomised the value of articulate speech in a single phrase more tellingly than does Herder when he says: “The lyre of Amphion has not built cities. No magic wand has transformed deserts into gardens. Language has done it,--that great source of sociality.”

Obviously, then, could we know the history of the evolution of articulate speech it would be one of the very greatest chapters in all human records; but it is equally obvious that we can never hope to know that history except inferentially. When the dawn of history proper came, man had so long practised speaking that he had developed countless languages so widely divergent from one another that they are easily classified into several great types. From the study of these languages the philologist draws more or less valid inferences as to the later stages of linguistic growth and development. But he gains no inklings whatever as to any of those earlier developments which constituted the origin or the creation of language.

_Second. Clothing and Housing of Prehistoric Man._

Nothing is more surprising to the student of antiquity than to find at what seems the very beginning of civilisation such monuments as the Pyramids and the great sculptures of Egypt and Mesopotamia. But a moment’s reflection makes it clear that man must have learned to house himself, as well as to clothe himself, before he can have started on that tour of conquest of the world which was so far advanced before the dawn of history. Doubtless the original home of man must have been in a tropical or subtropical climate, and he cannot well have left these pampering regions until he had made a considerable development, almost the first step of which required that he should gain the means of protecting himself from the cold. The idea of such protection once acquired, its elaboration was but a question of time. It is amazing to observe how closely, both as regards attire and building, man had approximated to the modern standards at the time when he first produced monumental or other records that have come down to us.

_Third. The Use of Fire._

Quite as fundamental as the matter of housing and clothing, and even more marvellous, considered as an invention, was the recognition of the uses of fire, and the development of the methods of producing fire at will. It is conceivable that some individual man at a relatively early stage of human progress developed and elaborated this idea, becoming the actual inventor of fire as applied to human uses. If such was really the case, no greater inventor ever lived. But the wildest flight of speculative imagination does not suffice to suggest where or when this man may have lived. It cannot well be doubted, however, that the use of fire must have been well known to the earliest generations of men that attempted to wander far from the tropics. Clothed, housed, and provided with fire, man was able to undertake the conquest of all regions, but without fire he dare not have braved the winters even of the middle latitudes, to say nothing of Arctic regions.

No doubt the earliest method of producing fire practically employed was by friction of dry sticks, much after the manner still in use among certain savage tribes. Obviously the flint and steel, which for so many thousands of years was to be the sole practical means of producing fire among the civilised races, could not have come into vogue until the age of iron. The lucifer match, which was finally to banish flint and steel, was an invention of the nineteenth century.

_Fourth. Implements of Peace and War._

A gigantic bound was made when man first learned to use a club habitually, and doubtless the transition from a club to a mechanically pointed spear constituted a journey as long and as hard as the evolution from the spear to the modern repeating rifle. But before the dawn of history there had been evolved from the club the battle-axe of metal, and from the crude spear the metal-pointed javelin, the arrow, the sword, and the dagger; the bow, too, of which the arrow was the complement, had long been perfected, and from it had evolved various other implements of warfare, culminating in the gigantic battering-ram.

Of implements of a more pacific character, boats of various types furnished means of transportation on the water, and wagons with wheel and axle, acting on precisely the same principle which is still employed, had been perfected, both of these being used in certain of their types for purposes of war as well as in the arts of peace. Manufacture included necessarily the making of materials for clothing from an early stage, and this had advanced from the crude art of dressing skins to the weaving of woollen fabrics and fine linens that would bear comparison with the products of the modern loom. Stones were shaped and bricks made as materials for building. The principle of the pulley was well understood as an aid to human strength; and the potter’s wheel, with which various household utensils were shaped, was absurdly like the ones that are still used for a like purpose. In all of these arts of manufacture, indeed, a degree of perfection had been attained upon which there was to be singularly little advance for some thousands of years. It was not until well toward the close of the eighteenth century that the series of great mechanical advances began with the application of steam to the propulsion of machinery, which has revolutionised manufacture and for the first time made a radical change from the systems of transportation that were in vogue before the dawn of history; and it was only a few centuries earlier that the invention of gunpowder metamorphosed the methods of warfare that had been in vogue for a like period.

_Fifth. The Domestication of Animals._

It is not difficult, if one considers the matter attentively, to imagine how revolutionary must have been the effect of the domestication of animals. Primitive man can at first have had no idea of the possible utility of the animals about him, except as objects of pursuit; but doubtless at a very early stage it became customary for children to tame, or attempt to tame, such animals as wolves, foxes, and cats of various tribes when taken young, much as children of to-day enjoy doing the same thing. This more readily led to the early domestication or half-domestication of such animals as that species of wolf from which the various races of dogs sprang. It is held that the dog was the first animal to become truly domesticated. Obviously this animal could be of advantage to man in the chase, even in very early stages of human evolution; and it is quite possible that a long series of generations may have elapsed before any animal was added to the list of man’s companions. But the great step was taken when herbivorous animals, useful not for the chase, but as supplying milk and flesh for food, were made tributary to the use of man. From that day man was no longer a mere hunter and fisher; he became a herdsman, and in the fact of entering upon a pastoral life, he had placed his foot firmly on the first rung of the ladder of civilisation. An obvious change became necessary in the life of pastoral people. They could still remain nomads, to be sure, but their wanderings were restricted by a new factor. They must go where food could be found for their herds. Moreover, economic features of vast importance were introduced in the fact that the herds of a people became a natural prey of less civilised peoples of the same region. It became necessary, therefore, to make provision for the protection of the herds, and in so doing an increased feeling of communal unity was necessarily engendered. Hitherto we may suppose that a single family might live by itself without greatly encountering interference from other families. So long as game was abundant, and equally open to the pursuit of all, there would seem to be no reason why one family should systematically interfere with another, except in individual instances where quarrels of a strictly personal nature had arisen. But the pastoral life introduced an element of contention that must necessarily have led to the perpetual danger of warfare, and concomitantly to the growing necessity for such aggregate action on the part of numerous families as constituted the essentials of a primitive government. It is curious to reflect on these two opposite results that must have grown almost directly from the introduction of the custom of domesticating food animals. On the one hand, the growth of the spirit of war between tribes; on the other, the development of the spirit of tribal unity, the germs of nationality.

Much thought has been given by naturalists to the exact origin of the various races of domesticated animals. Speaking in general terms, it may be said that Asia is the great original home of domesticated animals as a class. Possibly the dog may be the descendant of some European wolf, and he had perhaps become the companion of man before that great hypothetical eastward migration of the Aryans took place, which the modern ethnologist believes to have preceded the Asiatic settlement of that race. The cat also may not unlikely be a descendant of the European wild cat, but the sheep, the cow, the donkey, and the horse, as well as the barnyard fowl, are almost unquestionably of Asiatic origin. Of these the horse was probably the last to be domesticated, since we find that the Egyptians did not employ this animal until a relatively late stage of the historic period, namely, about the twentieth century B.C. This does not mean that the horse was unknown to the Asiatic nations until so late a period, but it suggests a relatively recent use of this animal as compared, for example, with the use of cattle, which had been introduced into Egypt before the beginning of the historic period. No animal of importance and only one bird--the turkey--has been added to the list of domesticated creatures since the dawn of history.

_Sixth. Agriculture._

The studies of the philologists make it certain that long periods of time elapsed after man had entered on a pastoral life before he became an agriculturist. The proof of this is found, for example, in the fact that the Greeks and Romans use words obviously of the same derivation for the names of various domesticated animals, while a similar uniformity does not pertain to their names for cultivated cereals or for implements of agriculture. Theoretical considerations of the probable state of pastoral man would lead to the same conclusion, for the gap between the wandering habits of the owners of flocks, whose chief care was to find pasture, and the fixed abode of an agricultural people, is indeed a wide one. To be sure, the earliest agriculturist may not have been a strictly permanent resident of any particular district; he might migrate like the bird with the seasons, and change the region of his abode utterly from year to year, but he must in the nature of the case have remained in one place for several months together, that is to say, from sowing to harvest time; and to people of nomadic instincts this interference with their desires might be extremely irksome, to say nothing of the work involved in cultivating the soil. But once the advantages of producing a vegetable food supply, according to a preconceived plan, instead of depending upon the precarious supply of nature, were fully understood and appreciated, another great forward movement had been made in the direction of ultimate civilisation. Incidentally it may be added that another incentive had been given one tribe to prey upon another, and conversely another motive for strengthening the bonds of tribal unity.

Agricultural plants, like domesticated animals, are practically all of Asiatic origin. There are, however, three important exceptions, namely, maize among cereals and the two varieties of potato, all of which are indigenous to the Western hemisphere, and hence were necessarily unknown to the civilised nations of antiquity. With these exceptions all the important agricultural plants had been known and cultivated for numberless generations before the opening of the historic period.

_Seventh. Government._

We have just seen how the introduction of domesticated animals and agricultural plants must have influenced the communal habits of primitive man in the direction of the establishment of local government. There are reasons to believe that, prior to taking these steps, the most advanced form of human settlement was the tribe or clan consisting of the members of a single family. The unit of this settlement was the single family itself with a man at its head, who was at once provider, protector, and master. As the various members of a family held together in obedience to the gregarious instinct, which man shares with the greater number of animals, it was natural that some one member of the clan should be looked to as the leader of the whole. In the ordinary course of events, such leader would be the oldest man, the founder of the original family; but there must have been a constant tendency for younger men of pronounced ability to aspire to the leadership, and to wrest from the patriarch his right of mastery.

Such mastery, however, whether held by right of age, or of superior capacity, must have been in the early day very restricted in scope, for of necessity primitive man depended largely on his own individual efforts both for securing food, and for protection of himself and his immediate family against enemies, and under such circumstances an independence of character must have been developed that implies an unwillingness to submit to the autocratic authority of another. Only when the pastoral and agricultural phases of civilisation had become fully established, would communities assume such numerical proportions as to bring the question of leadership of the clan into perpetual prominence; and no doubt a very long series of internal strifes and revolutionary dissensions must have preceded the final recognition of the fact that no large community of people can aspire to anything like integrity without the clear recognition of some centralised authority. Under the conditions incident to the early stages of civilisation, where man was subject to the marauding raids of enemies, it was but natural that this centralised authority should be conceded to some man whose recognised prowess in warfare had aroused the respect and admiration of his fellows. Thus arose the system of monarchial government, which we find fully established everywhere among the nations of antiquity when they first emerge out of the obscuration of the prehistoric period. The slow steps of progress by which the rights of the individual came to strike an evener balance, as against the all-absorbing usurpations of the monarch and a small coterie of his adherents, constitute one of the chief elements of the story of history that is to be unfolded in our pages. But when the story opens, there is no intimation of this reaction. The monarch is all dominant; his individual subjects seem the mere puppets of his will.

_Eighth. The Arts of Painting, Sculpture, and Decorative Architecture._

The graven fragments of ivory and of reindeer horn, found in the cave deposits of the stone age, give ample proof that man early developed the desire and the capacity for drawing. Doubtless there was a more or less steady advance upon this art of the cave-dweller throughout succeeding generations, though the records of such progress are for the most part lost. The monuments of Egypt and of Mesopotamia, however, have been preserved to us in sufficient completeness to prove that the graphic arts had reached a really high stage of development before the close of the prehistoric period. It is but fair to add, however, that in this direction the changes of the earlier centuries of the historic period were far greater than were the changes in the practical arts.

As early as the ninth century B.C. the Assyrians had developed the art of sculpture in bas-relief in a way that constituted a marvellous advance upon anything that may reasonably be believed to have been performed by prehistoric man, and only three centuries later came the culminating period of Greek art, which marked the stage of almost revolutionary progress.

_Ninth. The Art of Writing._

One other art remains to be mentioned even in the most cursory survey. This is the latest, and in some respects the greatest of them all--the art of writing. In one sense this art is only a development of the art of drawing, but it is a development that has such momentous consequences that it may well be considered as distinct. Moreover, it led to results so important for the historian, and so directly in line of all our future studies, that we shall do well to examine it somewhat more in detail.

All the various phases of prehistoric culture at which we have just glanced have left reminiscences, more or less vague in character, for the guidance of students of later ages; but the materials for history proper only began to be accumulated after man had learned to give tangible expression to his thoughts in written words. No doubt the first steps toward this accomplishment were taken at a very early day. We have seen that the cave-dweller even made graphic though crude pictures, including hunting scenes, that are in effect the same in intent, and up to a certain point the same in result, as if the features of the event were described in words. Doubtless there was no generation after the stone age in which men did not resort, more or less, to the graphic delineation of ideas.

The familiar story that Herodotus tells of the message sent by the Scythians to Darius is significant. It will be recalled that the Scythian messenger brought the body of a bird, a mouse, and a frog, together with a bundle of five arrows. Interrogated as to the meaning of this strange gift, the messenger replied that his instructions were to present the objects and retire. Darius and his officers were much puzzled to interpret the message, Darius himself being disposed to regard it as an admission on the part of the Scythians that they conceded him lord of their territory, the land, water, and air; but one of the officers of the great king gave a different interpretation, which was presently accepted as the correct one. As he read the message it implied that unless the Persians could learn to fly through the air like birds, or to burrow through the earth like a mouse, or to dive through the water like a frog, they should not be able to escape the arrows of the Scythians. Miss Amelia B. Edwards, in her delightful book on Egypt, has hazarded some conjectures as to the exact way in which the bird and mouse and frog and arrows were presented to Darius. She believes that they were fastened to a piece of bark, or perhaps to a fragment of hide, in fixed position, so that they became virtually hieroglyphics. The question is interesting, but of no vital importance, since the exact manner of presentation would not in any way alter the intent, but would only bear upon the readiness of its interpretation. The real point of interest lies in the fact of this transmission of ideas by symbols, which constitutes the essence of the art of writing.

It may be presumed that crude methods of sending messages, not unlike this of the Scythians, were practised more or less independently, and with greater or less degrees of elaboration, by barbaric and half-civilised tribes everywhere. The familiar case of the American Indians, who were wont to send a belt of wampum and an arrow as a declaration of war, is an illustration in point. The gap between such a presentation of tangible objects and the use of crude pictures to replace the objects themselves would not seem, from a civilised standpoint, to be a very wide one. Yet no doubt it was an enormously difficult gap to cross. Granted the idea, any one could string together the frog, the bird, the mouse, and the arrows, but only here and there a man would possess the artistic skill requisite to make fairly recognisable pictures of these objects. It is true that the cave man of a vastly earlier period had developed a capacity to draw the outlines of such animals as the reindeer and the mammoth with astonishing verisimilitude. Professor Sayce has drawn the conclusion from this that the average man dwelling in the caves of France at that remote epoch could draw as well as the average Frenchman of to-day; but a moment’s consideration will make it clear that the facts in hand by no means warrant so sweeping a conclusion. There is nothing to show, nor is there any reason to believe, that the cave-dweller pictures that have come down to us are the work of average men of that period. On the contrary, it is much more likely that they were the work, not of average men, but of the artistic geniuses of their day,--of the Michelangelos, Raphaels, or if you prefer, the Landseers, the Bonheurs, and Corots of their time.

There is no more reason to suppose that the average cave dweller could have drawn the reindeer hunting scene or the famous picture of the mammoth, than that the average Frenchman of to-day could have painted the _Horse Fair_. There is no reason then to suppose that the average Scythian could have made himself equally intelligible to Darius by drawing pictures instead of sending actual objects, though quite possibly there were some men among the Scythian hordes who could have done so. The idea of such pictorial ideographs had seemingly not yet come to the Scythians, but that idea had been attained many centuries before by other people of a higher plane of civilisation. At least four thousand years before the age of Darius, the Babylonians, over whose descendants the Persian king was to rule, had invented or developed a picture-writing and elaborated it until it was able to convey, not merely vague generalities, but exquisite shades of meaning. The Egyptians, too, at a period probably at least as remote, had developed what seems an independent system of picture-writing, and brought it to an astonishing degree of perfection.

At least three other systems of picture-writing in elaborated forms are recognised, namely, that used by the Hittites in Western Asia, that of the Chinese, and that of the Mexican Indians in America. No dates can be fixed as to when these were introduced, neither is it possible to demonstrate the entire independence of the various systems; but all of them were developed in prehistoric periods. There seems no reason to doubt that in each case the picture-writing consisted originally of the mere graphic presentation of an object as representing an idea connected with that object itself, precisely as if the Scythians had drawn pictures of the mouse, the bird, the frog, and the arrows in order to convey the message to Darius. Doubtless periods of incalculable length elapsed after the use of such ideograms as this had come into vogue before the next great step was taken, which consisted in using a picture, not merely to represent some idea associated with the object depicted, but to represent a sound. Probably the first steps of this development came about through the attempt to depict the names of men. Since the name of a man is often a combination of syllables, having no independent significance, it was obviously difficult to represent that name in a picture record, and yet, in the nature of the case, the name of the man might often constitute the most important part of the record. Sooner or later the difficulty was met, as the Egyptian hieroglyphics prove to us, by adopting a system of phonetics, in which a certain picture stands for the sound of each syllable of the name. The pictures selected for such syllabic use were usually chosen because the name of the object presented by the picture began with the sound in question. Such a syllabary having been introduced, its obvious utility led presently to its application, not merely to the spelling of proper names, but to general purposes of writing.

One other step remained, namely, to make that final analysis of sounds which reduces the multitude of syllables to about twenty-five elementary sounds, and to recognise that, by supplying a symbol for each one of these sounds, the entire cumbersome structure of ideographs and syllables might be dispensed with. The Egyptians made this analysis before the dawn of history, and had provided themselves with an alphabet; but strangely enough they had not given up, nor did they ever relinquish in subsequent times, the system of ideographs and syllabics that mark the stages of evolution of the alphabet. The Babylonians at the beginning of their historic period had developed a most elaborate system of syllables, but their writing had not reached the alphabet stage.

The introduction of the alphabet to the exclusion of the cruder methods was a feat accomplished within the historic period by the Phœnicians, some details of which we shall have occasion to examine later on. This feat is justly regarded as one of the greatest accomplishments of the entire historic period. But that estimate must not blind us to the fact that the Egyptians and Babylonians, and probably also the Chinese, were in possession of their fully elaborated systems of writing long before the very beginnings of that historic period of which we are all along speaking. Indeed, as has been said, true history could not begin until individual human deeds began to be recorded in written words.