Chapter II: Part 2

However this may be, in the course of time and among human beings memory was the first record and as long as life was so simple that a man’s memory was sufficient for his own record uses and he felt no need of communicating to a distance, whether in space or time, the necessity of external records was not felt. As soon, however, as the number of a man’s cattle or cocoanut trees, or the contents of his hunting bag got beyond his count (perhaps beyond the number of his fingers and toes) or he felt the need of sending a message of defiance, peace, or ransom to a neighboring tribe, or from a hunting party back to the cave or wigwam, he began to make visible records—objects, specimens, images, and conventional signs of one sort or another. As the art progressed and became more and more complex, pictures of objects and pictures of gestures became the usual form of record until finally these pictures were recognized as standing for certain groups of sounds and phonetic writing had been invented.

Very soon after the introduction of phonetic writing documents began to abound and the chances of survival, therefore, to multiply. The Palermo stone seems to show that actual records by reign and by year of reign began in Egypt as early as the first king of the first dynasty. However that may be, within a few centuries of this time records and collections of records in Egypt had become abundant and varied, and these contained economic records, records of political and religious events, laws, censuses, etc., at least. In Babylonia too, long before 3200 B.C., there had been collections of laws, and a great variety of economic and religious documents.

In brief it may be said therefore that about 3400, or at least 3200 B.C., the vast number of documents, the firm establishment of phonetic record, the pains taken to insure permanence and the suggestions of methodical arrangement and custody point to the beginning of a strictly historic period.

§ 12. _Memory libraries_

The earliest form of library was, it is to be supposed, the memory library. This term is not fanciful and does not in any sense attempt figuratively to identify the human memory as such with the library. A few years ago this could have been done in an interesting way because a favorite analogy for conceiving the human brain was the system of pigeon-holes with different sorts of ideas classified and put away in their respective compartments furnishing a very exact analogy to a classified library. This analogy is now found less useful than terms of brain paths or other figures, although the actual geometrical location of each word in brain tissue in the case of memory is still not excluded and this possibility must have its bearing on the psychological study of memory libraries.

What is meant here by the memory library refers to the modern psychological study of inward speech and inward handwriting. This accounts for the existence of inward books and collections of books, and a collection of inward books is obviously a real library. It makes little difference where or how these are kept in the brain. They doubtless imply a library economy at least as different from that of printed and bound books as the books themselves are different from papyrus rolls, clay tablets, or phonographic records, but it is a real collection of books and the psychological study of the place and manner of their housing and the method of their arrangement and prompt service to the owner for his use is not a matter of analogy or figure of speech.

The essence of the book is a fixed form of words. The point is that a certain form of words worked into a unity is preserved in exactly that form. The author looks at it as a whole, prunes, corrects, substitutes better words for inferior ones, and generally works over it as a man works over a painting or statue. At the end of the process when the book is finished it is a fixed form of words, a new creation, an individuality. The ordinary habit of thought and conversation does not reach this point of fixed forms of words although in the case of very retentive memories, where the complete verbal form of conversation is remembered, it approaches it. In general men seldom remember the exact phraseology when they listen to a sermon or a story. On the other hand, however, the actor or the professional story teller can summon at will the exact verbal form of a great number of works and each of these works is properly a book. This permanent fixing of form undoubtedly implies some substance in which the words are recorded, but if that substance is the human brain the result is no less a book, a real record in the real substance, than if recorded in outward substance such as stone or ink.

The practice of keeping such inward records of exact fixed forms of words is not only the oldest form of record keeping and one extensively practised in illiterate periods, but it is commonly practised in modern life by orators who speak without notes, and as a method for the teaching of children before they learn to read (“memorizing”) as well as afterwards in the schools.

Among savage peoples the medicine man is often a library of tribal tradition although the modern ethnologists agree that he was by no means the only professional repository of tribal records. The ancient Mexicans, for example, seem to have had special secular chroniclers whose business it was to memorize public events, and to be a sort of walking public records office, memorizing public accounts of all sorts as well as the story of events. According to many critics of the Old Testament this primitive method continued the chief or only method of transmitting records in Palestine for 2000 years after it had given place to writing in Egypt and Babylonia. They hold that the Pentateuch was formed and transmitted by such oral verbal tradition. The Vedic books were, it used to be alleged, gathered and handed down by a rigorous organized system of memorizing, and this has a certain counterpart in modern times in that memorizing of the Confucian books and of the Koran which forms a chief part of the system of education in the respective cases. The strictness with which this method of transmission of memory books has been carried out to the point of fixing every word and even letter is perhaps best illustrated from the Jewish oral tradition as to the sounds of the vowels which apparently continued oral for centuries before they were represented by the vowel point signs.

Whether blind Homer composed his songs and recited them throughout Greece without reducing to writing or not, he might have done so and would have done as many another before him in doing so. As a matter of fact the excavations of the last dozen years show pretty clearly a pre-Homeric Greek writing, and Homer himself indeed once refers to the written tablet. But however that may be, the race of minstrels began long before Homer and still exists. In the Middle Ages they were each a walking library, often with a very large repertory, and the same is often true to-day among their successors the actors, reciters and the lecturers. The learning of poems and declamations by school children often results in an inward collection of definite verbal forms in considerable numbers. A more complex form of memory library is that of certain ancients who are alleged to have organized their slaves into a system, each of the slaves being assigned a certain number of works in a certain class to learn by heart and kept ready on call to recite when any one of these should be desired.

These inward or memory libraries may be distinguished into two chief kinds. As a matter of fact there are almost as many different kinds of inward books as there are outward books, but as the two chief ways of expression are voice and gesture, so the records of oral speech and gesture language, received by eye, ear, or touch, and inwardly recorded, are the chief kinds of memory books. These are quite distinct as to their processes of reception and record, and very possibly occupy different areas of the brain. These differences may in part be realized from common observation, but one must take pains to guard against the assumption that the inward record is a photograph. It is entirely possible that the brain record of the sound “man” differs as much from a picture of a man as the thread of a phonographic record does. The same is true as to the inward record of a picture word or alphabetical handwritten word. The inward record may no more be a microscopic picture than the stenographic sign is. Nevertheless it is not hard to realize that there is somehow within a series of recorded impressions which may be called images, some of which recall sounds and others objects or gestures. The inward language may or may not have to do with sounds. Modern pantomime and the sign language of deaf-mutes and Indians are languages, and it is entirely possible to store in one’s mind an exact series of signs telling a story in gesture language, just as it is possible to store the symbols for sounds or oral speech.

One of the most interesting chapters in the antiquities of ancient nations and of modern savage tribes is the story of liturgical rites, sacred dances, symbolic processions, and the like. Savage dances e.g. sometimes rehearse events of the hunt or war or domestic scenes. In many of these cases what may be called historic events are represented and the whole ceremony is a rehearsal of these events, although wholly in gesture expression, with gesture or object symbols and without speech. It is the recital of visually memorized records in visual symbols, but the records are just as truly definite accounts of events, or records, or books if you like, as if they were oral words remembered and expressed by voice or in writing. In religious dances and dramatic religious ceremonies, the traditional representations were of ideas rather than events—the nature of the world and man, the future world and the means of attaining this,—and these formed groups and sequences of transmitted ideas quite as definite to the initiated as if expressed orally or in writing.

In the ceremonial processions of the Egyptians and in the Greek mysteries, these representations often become very elaborate and were, apparently, in the secret mysteries, often accompanied by oral explanations by the exegete. It is possible that in the case of both Greek and Egyptian mysteries the transmission had even ceased to be exclusive memory transmission, and that written records, or at least mnemonic tokens of some elaborateness, were preserved in the various chests or baskets carried in the ceremonies. However that may be, these were at least the more elaborate historical successors of symbolic dances and other ceremonies, transmitted among primitive men through visual and muscular sense memory, just as poems were preserved in auditory images and transmitted by oral utterance.

The significant point is that whether the ritual used in the mysteries was transmitted in auditory or visual images, and whether these symbols were external and kept in the basket or chest, which was carried about in the procession, or merely kept in memory, they were, so far as they were separate, complete and stable image-forms, real words, books, and libraries.

§ 13. _Pictorial object libraries_

The simplest and presumably earliest form of outward record is the pictorial object record i.e. an object “in which a picture of the thing is given, whereby at a glance it tells its own story” as Clodd (p. 35) says of the corresponding image signs which form what is commonly thought of as “picture writing”. These pictorial objects are distinguished from mnemonic objects (quipu, abacus, etc.) as pictographic image writing is from ideographic and phonetic writing, by the fact that in themselves they suggest somehow the things meant while mnemonic objects or images require previous agreement or explanation.

The pictorial objects used for writing may be whole objects or parts of objects and they may stand for individuals or for classes of things, e.g. a goat’s head may stand for a certain wild goat killed on a certain hunting trip or, with numbers attached, it may stand for a herd of domestic goats.

The earliest records were no doubt whole object records of individuals. When the hunter first brought home his quarry this had in it most of the essential elements of handwriting (those left behind could read in it the record of the trip) and when he brought useless quarry, simply to show his prowess, it had in it all the elements of the record, as has in fact the bringing by a dog of a woodchuck to his master or the bringing home by a modern boy of a uneatable string of fish to “show”. The bringing home from war of living captives to be slain, or dead bodies to be hung from the ship’s prow or nailed on the city gates, has the same motive and the same record character. So too the hanging of criminals on gibbets has the character both of the record-book and the instruction book. In these cases the very object itself is kept and exhibited—the whole object (though without life). Perhaps the nearest approach to the whole object library, in the sense of a permanent collection of records, was when all the permanent spoils of a campaign were “devoted” or “laid up” and kept together for memorial rather than economic purposes in the treasury of the temple.

A strict modern illustration of this case is a collection of battle flags taken or carried in a certain war, campaign or battle. Or again if a modern hunter should have all the spoils of a certain hunt stuffed and mounted as a record of the hunt, this would be of the same nature—a whole object record collection with an object to stand for every individual.

The sample or specimen whole object record as distinguished from the individual record is in modern times extensively known and used in the sale of goods by travelling salesmen. In its rudiments as a means of visible communication of ideas it was doubtless as old and perhaps older even than the keeping of trophies for record. If e.g. man was herbivorous before he was carnivorous then doubtless primitive man scouting for food would bring back specimens for his family just as a modern boy may bring in specimens of the wild grapes or berries that he has found for information of the folks at home. The best modern illustration of the sample or specimen whole object is in museums, menageries, zoological and botanical gardens, and the like, where specimens of various kinds of objects are gathered to stand for classes, without any special regard to the number in the class.

Museums in general illustrate object record. The historical museums generally and collections of historical relics large and small, together with mineral, plant or animal collections of rare objects, otherwise unknown, or species otherwise extinct (e.g. the American bison) are of the nature of individual whole object records, while all museums come so close to the idea of the library, either in the matter of record or in the purpose of message or information, that one is tempted to describe museums as rudimentary libraries, and libraries as more complex museums. Art museums are in this aspect a sort of transition between the museum proper or whole object library and the library proper or the image-symbol-record collection.

Whole object record is, however, evidently cumbersome, and man, observing this, early learned a fact very significant for the history of handwriting i.e. that for record, reminder, or information, a part of an object may serve just as well as a whole object. This principle of the abbreviation of signs for the sake of economy is perhaps the most striking and consistent principle in the whole history of handwriting. It is the principle which led not only from the whole to the part and sample but from the part object to the mnemonic object, from object to image, from image to ideogram, and which prevails throughout the whole farther development of phonetic handwriting, during which picture phonetic signs became more and more conventionalized, through syllabic writing into alphabetic, and it is the law which has produced the numerous variations in the numberless historical alphabets, issuing also finally in numberless systems of stenography. This abbreviation is very early found in war trophies and in hunting trophies. In war it was found that the heads, hands, ears or scalps of enemies or even the left hand or right hand or ear, as conventionally agreed upon, was just as good an evidence of prowess and much more transportable than whole bodies—and Borneo and Filipino head hunters and American Indian scalpers have practised this discovery in very recent times.

In the case of hunting trophies the history was the same. Actual bodies brought back from a hunting trip were not altogether a permanent record, but after the tribal feast or sacrifice (commonly perhaps in earliest times both in one) the head and skin remained and formed a potentially more permanent record. Even in modern times such skins may be kept as wholes—stuffed for museum purposes or as hunting trophies, and they are, indeed, often mounted as rugs with both head and tail attached. In this stage they form what may be still counted as whole object records but from this stage object abbreviation followed as rapidly as in war trophies. If the skin was separated from head and horns for economic reasons, either was found to serve the purposes of record. A man’s collection of pelts e.g. is obviously a collection of hunting records as well as a collection of wealth. The Egyptian determinative for quadruped is, as a matter of fact, the picture not of a whole animal but of a skin with tail and without head. On the other hand, head and horns served equally as well for record as skin and tail, whether the purpose was a mere record of exploits or a record of sacrifices. This precise stage is amply represented in the modern hunting lodge with its heads of moose or other animals, and it is possible that the expression so many “head of cattle” is a relic of this stage.

In each of these cases the principle of the characteristic part obtains i.e. the abbreviation is not beyond the point where the object can be recognized at sight as standing for a certain animal.

The principle of the characteristic part once established, the tendency to abbreviation for the sake of economy in transportation, storage, or exhibition, led rapidly to the use of the very simplest unmistakable part showing the individual and then to the simplest unmistakable part showing kind. In the case of war-trophies head was reduced to scalp, and this was conventionalized again so that the trophy scalp consisted of a very small portion from a particular point on the head. In the case of hunting trophies, the head was reduced to perhaps ears or horns, tusks or teeth. The process is found definitely illustrated in the Cretan history in the reduction of the ox’s head to simple horns in ritual use, and vestiges of this are probably also to be found in the symbolic use of horns on altars, horns on men as a symbol of power, and the like. On the other hand the skin and tail separated from the horns followed the same law of progressive economy and was reduced perhaps to the tail only (the fox’s brush) or the claws (the primitive claw necklaces).

The modern bounty on wolf scalps contains the whole principle of characteristic part abbreviation up to this point in a nutshell. It is the smallest unmistakable readily recognized and nonduplicable part. It is important for individual record that it should not be possible to collect two bounties on one wolf or to boast of two fish caught or two dead enemies, where there has been but one.

It is thus not fancy or jest to say the scalp belt of an American Indian chief (albeit this did not play such a part in the Indian world as is commonly imagined), or the tiger-tooth necklace of the African chief, is a collection of records representing a rather advanced stage of evolution.

Abbreviations in the case of sample records may be carried one step farther still, for a single eagle’s feather or a very small piece of fur shows kind just as well as a head or tail or a whole skin.

Perhaps the best examples of collections of record objects in the most abbreviated forms are, for individual records, the collections of trophies worn on the person, and for specimen records the medicine bag of West Africa.

Individual trophy collections are common to all primitive peoples and everywhere tended towards abbreviated trophies which could be worn. It would be more than rash to trace the use of clothing and all personal adornment to the wearing of trophies as there is some slight temptation to do, but trophy necklaces, feather bonnets, and the like, were certainly worn in many tribes and without very much other clothing, either of protective or ornamental character. The leopard’s tooth necklace of the African chief, recording the number of leopards slain by his tribe, and the feather bonnet of the American Indian, are true record collections. In general all objects of personal adornment among primitive peoples are symbolic, that is, they have meaning and are of the nature of writing. They are kept for record rather than as objects of beauty or for the enhancement of personal beauty. Labrets, for example, are a sign of aristocratic birth, and even if the objects worn are ritual rather than trophy in character, still each one has its symbolic meaning, and the expert may read in each collection a tale of events or of specific religious ideas almost as clearly as in the phonetic words of a printed book.

The West African medicine bag, like other medicine bags, contained a collection of so called fetish objects of all sorts—bits of fur, feathers, claws, hair, twigs, bark, etc., etc.—but the use of these objects was not for medicine or magical purposes as commonly understood. They formed obviously an object record collection quite in the nature of a collection of books. As each object was drawn out of the bag, the keeper of the bag recited some appropriate tale or formula for which the object stood.

This probably casts light on many other so-called fetish collections of primitive people, as for example those of the North American Indians. “Mooney says, in describing the fetish, that it may be a bone, a feather, a carved or painted stick, a stone arrowhead, a curious fossil or concretion, a tuft of hair, a necklace of red berries, the stuffed skin of a lizard, the dried hand of an enemy, a small bag of pounded charcoal mixed with human blood—anything, in fact ... no matter how uncouth or unaccountable, provided it be easily portable and attachable. The fetish might be ... even a trophy taken from a slain enemy, or a bird, animal, or reptile.” (Hodge. HandbAmInd 1:458.)

These fetishes might be kept in the medicine sack (the Chippewa pindikosan) or “It might be fastened to the scalp-lock as a pendant, attached to some part of the dress, hung from the bridle bit, concealed between the covers of a shield, or guarded in a special repository in the dwelling. Mothers sometimes tied the fetish to the child’s cradle.” (Hodge. HandbAmInd 1:458.)

These fetishes represent not only events but ideas (a vision, a dream, a thought, or an action). They represent not only religious and mythological ideas and tribal records, but individual exploits in war or hunting and other individual records. In short, the medicine bag the world over is a collection of recorded ideas, both of historical and mythological character if not also of an economic character.

So far as the “fetish” objects are not trophy objects, but stand for ideas, they form a transition to the mnemonic object, but so long as the object is such as to suggest to the keeper and expounder the idea of the particular form of words or ideas which he relates, it is still to be counted as object rather than mnemonic writing e.g. if a bit of fox fur suggests a story of a fox, it is still to be counted a pictorial object rather than a mnemonic object.

If twenty eagle feathers, e.g. stand for twenty eagles, or twenty small bits of fur for twenty reindeer, these sample objects are still used pictorially, but if a feather head-dress is made of eagle’s feathers, each feather symbolizing some particular exploit, the matter has passed over from the pictorial to the mnemonic stage.

§ 14. _Mnemonic object libraries_

Mnemonic writing, as it is generally treated in the textbooks, includes all sorts of simple memory aids, and is generally, and probably rightly, regarded by writers of palaeography as preceding picture writing, although there is an element of abstractness even in the tally or knotted cord or pebble as compared with the actual imitation or representation of the picture, and in the evolution of human thinking, other things being equal, the abstract necessarily follows the concrete in time and in the order of evolution.

The most familiar examples of mnemonic books are the quipus or knotted cord books, the notch books, which include tallies and message sticks, the wampum belts of American Indians, and the abacus. Collections of any of these kept in the medicine tent or temple, or even the counting house, are, of course, true libraries, or at least true collections of written documents as generally understood by the historians of writing.

The knotted cord is best known under the name of quipu, which was the name for the Peruvian knot record. At bottom the idea does not differ from the simple tying of knots in a handkerchief as a reminder, or the sailor’s log line. It has been most commonly used for numerical records, but in many cases it preserved and transmitted very extensive historical records. One very simple use was the noting on different colored cords by knots the number of the different animals taken to market for sale, and again the price received for these at market.

It is still used among the Indians of Peru and some North American Indians, also in Hawaii and among various African tribes, and all over Eastern Asia and the Pacific.

It was the traditional method in China before the use of written characters, and the written characters themselves were, it is alleged, made up out of these combined with the pictures of bird tracks.

Among the ancient civilizations there are many remains or reminiscences of these knot books. They are found among the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics (as in the sign for amulet and perhaps in several other signs); they appear also in the mnemonic knotted fringes to garments in the Jewish antiquities and, as Herodotus tells us, Darius made use of such knots to guide certain Ionians who remained behind to guard a bridge as to when it should be time for them to sail away. In 1680 the Pueblo Indians of North America marked the days to their uprising in the same way.

This use of the knotted cord for amulets is among the most widespread of uses, being found among the medicine men of nearly all primitive peoples. Juno wore such an amulet, and Ulysses carried one.

Among the ancient Peruvians and Mexicans there were many collections of quipus in charge of official recorders.

Traces of ancient use survive in the knots of a cardinal’s hat and perhaps most interestingly of all in the nautical knot used in casting the log or sounding. We may still travel so many knots an hour or sink mayhap so many fathoms deep. The knotted measuring line with fathom marks is probably the direct historical descendant of the Egyptian measuring line and by the same token probably of the Egyptian sign for one hundred, the fathom like one of the Egyptian units being at bottom the stretch of a man’s arm.

A COLLECTION OF MESSAGE STICKS
FROM HOWITT. NATIVE TRIBES OF S. E. AUSTRALIA,
p. 704
]

Most of the extant quipus have been found in graves. There is a “very extensive collection” of these in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and a recent study of these (by L. L. Locke) concludes that they were used purely for numerical purposes and not for counting but for record keeping.

The best known notch books are the message sticks used in Australia and Africa and the tally used in the British Exchequer up to a recent date for the keeping of accounts. This is the method, famous in fiction for the recording on their knife-hilts by Indians and superhuman white scouts of the number of scalps taken in war. It is the essence of the so-called Clog Almanac, the nick-stick, and other ways of notching up accounts still often found in rural communities. The memory of it survives in the use of the word score or so many tallies, used until recently of the runs made in baseball.

Collections of notch records are found at least among the Australian aborigines—and it will be remembered that it was the burning of the huge collection of tallies in the early part of the last century which resulted in the setting fire to and burning up of the parliament houses.

It is possible that the notch method was preceded by a system of stripping off leaves or twigs from a branch, leaving a certain number. The early pictures of Seshait, goddess of writing among the Egyptians, who records the years of a king’s reign, suggests possibly this method, and in this case perhaps also the Egyptian sign for year with its single projection may refer to this method.

Wampum is one of the best known and most picturesque forms of mnemonic object writing. It was used by the American Indians for treaties, title deeds, memorials of events, etc., and considerable collections of these tribal records were not uncommon. Although in itself a later and more complex style, in essence it stands for a style still older than the knot writing which it resembles. Existing examples of wampum leave the simple mnemonic knot or notch far behind and have progressed even to figures or pictures often of an advanced or symbolic type, made in the beads, but the beads themselves stand for what may perhaps be the very earliest form of mnemonic record—that is the object record where each object is represented not by a pictorial object but by some sample object like a pebble or a twig. The heap of pebbles used for counting was possibly the very earliest mnemonic record.

An extremely interesting modern example of calculation in pebbles and the representation by them even of sums in addition, multiplication, and subtraction, turns up among the psychological investigations in the matter of mathematical prodigies. It appears that most of the famous lightning calculators have been the children of peasants, and a large part of these Italian shepherd boys, who apparently used pebbles for the counting of their sheep and amused themselves by making a plaything of these. Other lightning calculators (Ampère e.g.) used pebbles, and Bidder a bag of shot, while others have taught themselves by the use of marbles, peas, or the use of their fingers. (Bruce in McClure v. 39, 1912, pp. 593-4.) The counting by pebble heaps is found indeed generally in the playing of children. When it comes to transporting or making more permanent collections this was done by means of a pouch in the case of pebbles—one of the earliest forms of record holder and one of the most ancient forms even of phonetic writings, or tying together in bundles as in the case of twig bundles found among primitive peoples, or by stringing together as in trophy necklaces or some forms of the abacus.

A COLLECTION OF WAMPUM
AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, N. Y.
Nos. 150.1/1945, 1579 A.D. 50/2287, 2902
]

With these mnemonic object writings is perhaps also to be classed the symbols formed with bits of wood used in the Indian game of cañute described by J. P. Harrington. “The San Ildefonso cañute figures present a symbolism so highly conventionalized and so complex that the term language might well be applied—a symbolism not essentially different in origin or practice from human speech, gesture language, African drum language, conventionalized graphic designs that have a commonly understood meaning, or writing whether executed in pictograms, ideograms, phonograms, or phonetic symbols” (AmAnthropol n.s. 14, 1912, p. 265). “These figures are, it is said, made much in the same fashion as children graphically represent certain ideas by arranging small objects.”

§ 15. _Picture book libraries_

Savage tribes in general have not progressed beyond the image stage of writing or at most beyond a sort of syllabic stage which corresponds to what we know as the rebus. This picture writing is the known origin however of all the oldest historical writing systems. As we all know, children too read their picture books long before they read print or writing. Picture writing and picture books have always survived among cultured nations and have a great vogue to-day, especially through the introduction of pictures into newspapers and through moving pictures.

The earliest existing picture writing of the Stone Age includes many images of domestic animals in the caves of the Pyrenees with apparently conventional signs sometimes accompanying them. Prehistoric picture writing in the Mediterranean regions includes also pottery marks, figures of animals or parts of animals used to distinguish ships and having their modern counterpart in the ship’s figurehead, also the seals, milk-stones of Crete, the rock carvings of Liguria and the like.

The very first beginnings of picture writing are perhaps to be found in natural object images. The Chinese ascribed the origin of their written characters to bird tracks, and many primitive peoples used stones which accidentally resembled animals as images of them.

Perhaps the most natural and earliest reading of records is the reading of footprints of hunted birds and animals. From these tracks the expert woodsman may read the kind and number of individuals passing, the direction that they are taking, and many other details. This fact is familiar with all hunting, and it is famous in the trailing of both men and animals by American Indians and by primitive people generally. The method is still much used in the tracking of criminals by footprints, and more especially and scientifically in these days by finger-print records. These records are actual images of parts of individuals, and it is not incredible, even if not evidenced, that the earliest use of writing by the Chinese should have been the imitation of birds’ tracks in clay by some hunter in order to describe the kind of birds that he had seen.

It has been mentioned at various points in this paper that the record of number is near, if not at, the beginning of permanent records, and Gow, in his History of Greek mathematics, has a theory that the record of numbers above ten began by impressing the ten fingers in the moist earth.

RECORD ORNAMENT OF IMITATION LEOPARD TEETH
FROM FROBENIUS. CHILDHOOD OF MAN, p. 27
]

Another very early form was the natural rock having some accidental resemblance to bird or beast, or else formed by very slight chipping of a natural image, as in some cases in the Pyrenean caves. Various American Indian tribes used natural fossils or accidental images in this way. The transition from a slight chipping to sculpture is, of course, an easy one.

Perhaps the simplest and most natural transition from pictorial object to image writing is suggested by the trophy records of an African chief as described by Frobenius. The actual record trophies of leopard hunting—the leopard’s teeth—are taken and worn in a necklace by the chief and form a tribal record. The individual making the killing has, however, a wooden model of the tooth which he wears as an individual trophy. This very simple and natural proceeding has in it the germ of picture writing,—is indeed picture writing.

Among the more primitive forms of picture writing are tattooing and body painting. Tattooing is used among many savage tribes to-day and all over the world. This was known in the most ancient times and is often practised to-day especially by sailors and boys, sometimes quite elaborately. Among the savage tribes it was used for religious, political, and economic purposes. One use was as identification mark. This might be a tribal mark or individual mark, and in either case is very closely connected with the totem idea. In either case it might also be used, and was used, as a property or ownership mark to which the tattoo mark corresponded. This is perhaps linked with the ancient Egyptian tattooing through the tribal mark of the modern Nubian.

The war paint of the American Indian is as old as the Stone Age in the Mediterranean and is made most curiously interesting by a considerable number of so called Pintadores still existent. These Pintadores form the earliest known step in the history of printing, for they consist of stamps with which the paint could be applied in various figures after the fashion of the modern rubber stamp. These figures, like the war paint of the American Indians, probably had various symbolic meanings according to the figures and the colors used, and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that there were libraries of printed books in this Stone Age—if by any chance collections of sample impressions from these stamps were kept for any purpose. At any event, when applied they formed what some people would call a living library. Certain tablets possibly used for a similar purpose have been found also among the North American Indians.

Body and face painting naturally preceded tattooing—the latter being simply a method of making the record permanent. The methods may or may not have arisen from the marks made by the pressure of trophy necklaces, bracelets, etc., on the skin, or from being etched by the sun on the unprotected skin of light complexioned tribes. However they may have arisen, these two methods of skin marking are among the very early forms of record, were often used to record exploits or events, and sometimes to record an extraordinary number and variety of matters. It seems also to be established that these body pictures were sometimes intended as copies of trophy necklaces or other ornaments.

There are many ways beside skin marks in which the idea of image making might have suggested itself to primitive man, inheriting as he perhaps did from an animal ancestry a strong instinct for imitation—the shadow, reflection in water, actual fossils of animals, the etching of sunburn, the silhouette of a tree or animal against the horizon, natural stone forms, tracks in clay, etc.—but in skin marks, natural or artificial, we see the transition process in actual operation.

TUPAI CUPA’S TATTOO MARKS, SHOWING A GROUP
OF VARIOUS RECORDS
FROM PARSON’S STORY OF NEW ZEALAND, p. 16
]

The fact that savages, when they took off their detachable ornaments to go to war or for ritual dances and the like, put on paint, suggests possibly that the painted forms are images of the things removed.

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.”

PICTURE WRITING. LONE DOG’S WINTER COUNT.
SERIES OF VARIOUS RECORDS
FROM MALLERY (1882-3) pl. vi
]

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.