Chapter XVI: History

It is seldom possible to distinguish by pictographs, or indeed to decide from oral accounts obtained from Indians, whether those purporting to be historical have a genuine basis or are merely traditions connected with myths. This chapter may therefore be correlated with Chapter IX, section 5, which has special relation to traditions as mnemonically pictured. The notes now following are considered to refer to actual events or to explain the devices used in the record of such events.

The account by Dr. Brinton (_c_) of the Walum-Olum or bark record of the Lenni-Lenapé, as also some of Schoolcraft’s pictographic illustrations, may with some propriety be regarded as historic, but are so well known that their specific citation is needless.

The American Indians have not produced detailed historic pictures, such as appear on the Column of Trajan, and the Bayeux tapestry, with such excellence in art as to be self-interpreting. Neither do they equal in this respect the Egyptian and Assyrian sculptures, which portray the ordering of battle, the engineering work of sieges, the plan of camps, and the tactical moves of chieftains. Those sculptures also depict the whole civil and domestic lives of the peoples of the several nations. In some of these particulars the Mexicans approached these graphic details, as is shown below, but, as a rule, in the three divisions of America, history was noted and preserved by ideographic methods supplementing the incompleteness of artistic skill.

With regard to the advance gained by the Mexicans reference is made, with regret that copious quotation is impossible, to the essay of Henry Phillips, jr. (_a_), and to the monumental work of Eugène Boban, before cited. It will be noticed by students that ideography and its attendant conventionalism continually appear in the pictographic histories mentioned. The original authors had not advanced very far in art, but they had not lost the thought-language, which preceded art.

The subject is here divided into: (1) Record of expedition; (2) Record of battle; (3) Record of migration; (4) Record of sociologic events.