The Dawn of History: An Introduction to Pre-Historic Study

by C. F. Keary

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.

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.

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.