Evolution in Art: As Illustrated by the Life-histories of Designs

by Alfred C. Haddon

Pictographs.

A pictograph is writing by means of a picture. It records and conveys a fact or an idea by graphic means, without the employment of words or letters. As pictography belongs to a low plane of culture, so far as the visual communication of information is concerned, the representations are generally very crude. By no means should they be regarded as typical examples of the artistic skill of the people who execute them. They are intended for picture-writing, not for pictures. An examination of pictographs shows at once that only essential or salient characters are noted, and when objects are frequently repeated they become conventionalised, and in their later forms cannot be regarded as in any sense objective portraitures.

Nowhere in the world are pictographs so much employed as in America, and fortunately it is possible to gain precise information respecting their signification. Colonel Mallery[115] has devoted himself to an exhaustive study of North American pictography, and I cannot do better than briefly detail a few of his deductions.

“A general deduction, made after several years of study of pictographs of all kinds found among the North American Indians, is that they exhibit very little trace of mysticism or of esotericism in any form. They are objective representations, and cannot be treated as ciphers or cryptographs in any attempt at their interpretation. A knowledge of the customs, costumes, including arrangement of the hair, paint, and all tribal designations, and of their histories and traditions, is essential to the understanding of their drawings. Comparatively few of their picture signs have become merely conventional. A still smaller proportion are either symbolical or emblematic. By far the larger part of them are merely mnemonic records, and are treated of in connection with material objects formerly and, perhaps, still used mnemonically.

“It is believed that the interpretation of the ancient forms is to be obtained, if at all, not by the discovery of any hermeneutic key, but by an understanding of the modern forms, some of which fortunately can be interpreted by living men; and when this is not the case the more recent forms can be made intelligible, at least in part, by thorough knowledge of the historic tribes, including their sociology, philosophy, and arts, such as is now becoming acquired, and of their sign language.

“It is not believed that any considerable information of value in an historical point of view will be obtained directly from the interpretation of the pictographs in North America. They refer generally to some insignificant fight or some season of plenty or famine.

“Ample evidence exists that many of the pictographs, both ancient and modern, are connected with the mythology and religious practices of their makers.

“Some of them were mere records of the visits of individuals to important springs or to fords on regularly established trails. In this respect there seems to have been, in the intention of the Indians, very much the same spirit as induces the civilised man to record his initials upon objects in the neighbourhood of places of general resort.

“One very marked peculiarity of the drawings of the Indians is that within each particular system, such as may be called a tribal system, of pictography, every Indian draws in precisely the same manner. The figures of a man, of a horse, and of every other object delineated, are made by every one who attempts to make any such figure with all the identity of which their mechanical skill is capable, thus showing their conception of motive to be the same” (pp. 15-17; all the quotations are from the Fourth Ann. Rep.).