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

by C. F. Keary

Knot-records were almost everywhere superseded by other methods of recording events as civilization advanced; but still they continued to be resorted to under special circumstances, and by people who had not the pens of ready writers. Darius made a quipus when he took a thong, and tying sixty knots on it, gave it to the Ionian chiefs, that they might untie a knot every day, and go back to their own land if he had not returned when all the knots were undone. The Scythians, however, who, about the same time, sent a message to Darius, afford us an example of another way of attaching special meanings to certain objects, and thereby giving a peculiar use as aids to memory,—writing letters with objects instead of pen and ink, in fact. Here, however, symbolism comes in, and makes the mnemonics at once prettier and less trustworthy as capable of more than one interpretation. The Scythian ambassadors presented Darius (as Herodotus tells us) with a mouse, a bird, a frog, and an arrow, and the message with which they had been intrusted was that, unless he could hide in the earth like a mouse, or fly in the air like a bird, or swim in water like a frog, he would never escape the arrows of the Scythians.

Of this last kind of mnemonic was the bow, too heavy for an ordinary man to bend, which the long-lived Ethiopians sent to Cambyses; and the twelve memorial stones which Joshua was directed to place in the river Jordan, in order that the sons might ask the fathers, and the fathers tell the sons what had happened in that place; and, again, such were the yokes and bonds which Jeremiah put round his neck when he testified against the alliance with Egypt before Zedekiah, and the earthen pot that he broke in the presence of the elders of the people. Signs joined with words and actions to convey a fuller or more exact meaning than words alone could convey. Perhaps we ought hardly to call these last examples helps to memory; they partake more of the nature of pictures, and were used to heighten the effect of words. But we may regard them as a connecting link between the merely mechanical tally, wampum and quipus, and the effort to record ideas we must now consider—picturing. It must, however, always be borne in mind that, though we shall speak of these various methods of making records as stages of progress and development, it is not to be supposed that the later ones immediately, or indeed ever wholly, superseded the first any more than the introduction of bronze and iron did away with the use of flint weapons. The one method subsisted side by side with the other, and survived to quite late times, as we see in such usages as the bearing forth of the fiery cross to summon clansmen to the banner of their chieftain, and the casting down of the knight’s glove as a gage of battle, or, to come down to homely modern instances, the tallies and knots on handkerchiefs that unready writers carry to help their memories even now.

Helps to memory of the kinds which we have been speaking of never get beyond being helps. They cannot carry thought from one to another without the intervention of an interpreter, in whose memory they keep fast the words that have to be said; they strengthen tradition, but they cannot change tradition into history, and are always liable to become useless by the death of the man, or order of men, to whom they have been intrusted.

Picturing.

A more independent and lasting method of recording events was sure to be aimed at sooner or later; and we may conjecture that it usually took its rise among a people at the period when their national pride was so developed as to make them anxious that the deeds of some conspicuous hero should be made known, not only to those interested in telling and hearing of them, but to strangers visiting their country, and to remote descendants. Their first effort to record an event, so as to make it widely known, would naturally be to draw a picture of it, such that all seeing the picture would understand it; and accordingly we find that the earliest step beyond artificial helps to memory is the making of rude pictures which aim at showing a deed or event as it occurred without suggesting the words of a narrative; this is called ‘picturing’ as distinguished from picture-writing. That this, too, was a very early art we may guess from the fact that rude pictures of animals have been found among the relics of the earliest stone age. Whether or no we are justified in conjecturing that the pictures actually found are rough memorials of real hunting scenes, at least we learn from them that the thought of depicting objects had come, and the skill to produce a likeness been attained; and the idea of using this power to transmit events lies so near to its possession, that we can hardly believe one to have been long present without the other. To enable ourselves to imagine the sort of picture-records with which the stone-age men may have ornamented some of their knives, spears, and hammers, we must examine the doings of people who have continued in a primitive stage of civilization down to historic times.

Some curious pictures done by North American Indians have been found on rocks and stones, and on the stems of pine-trees in America, which furnish excellent examples of early picturing. Mr. Tylor, in his Early History of Mankind, gives engravings of several of these shadowy records of long-past events. One of these, which was found on the smoothed surface of a pine-tree, consists merely of a rude outline of two canoes, one surmounted by a bear with a peculiar tail and the other by a fish, and beyond these a quantity of shapes meant for a particular kind of fish. The entire picture records the successes of two chieftains named Copper-tail Bear and Cat-fish, in a fishing excursion. Another picture found on the surface of a rock near Lake Superior is more elaborate, and interests us by showing a new element in picturing, through which it was destined to grow into the condition of picture-writing. This more elaborate picture shows an arch with three suns in it—a tortoise, a man about to mount a horse, and several canoes, one surmounted by the image of a bird. All this tells that the chief called King-fisher made an expedition of three days across a lake, and arriving safely on land, mounted his horse. The new element introduced into this picture is symbolism, the same that transformed the homely system of tallies into the Scythian’s graceful living message to Darius. It shows the excess of thought over the power of expression, which will soon necessitate a new form. The tortoise is used as a symbol of dry land. The arch is, of course, the sky, and the three suns in it mean three days. The artist who devised these ways of expressing his thought was on the verge of picture-writing, which is the next stage in the upward progress of the art of recording events, and the stage at which some nations have terminated their efforts.

Picture-writing.

Picture-writing differs from picturing in that it aims at conveying to the mind, not a representation of an event, but a narrative of the event in words, each word being represented by a picture. The distinction is of immense importance. The step from the former to the latter is one of the greatest which mankind has ever made in the course of its progress in civilization. When the step had been made the road toward the acquisition of a regular alphabet lay comparatively open. It was still beset with difficulties, but none so great as the difficulty of making this particular step. Let us try and fully understand this. We will take a sentence and see how it might be conveyed by the two methods. A man slew a lion with a bow and arrows while the sun went down. Picturing would show the man with a drawn bow in his hand, the lion struck by the arrow, the sun on the horizon. Picture-writing would present a series of little pictures and symbols dealing separately with each word—a man, a symbol for ‘slew,’ say a hand smiting, a lion, a connecting symbol for ‘with,’ and so on. We see at once how much more elaborate and exact the second method is, and that it makes the telling of a continuous story possible. We also discover that these various stages of writing correspond to developments of language, and that as languages grow in capacity to express nobler thoughts, a greater stress will be put upon invention to render the more recondite words by pictures and symbols, till at last language will outgrow all possibility of being so rendered, and another method of showing words to the eye will have to be thought of—for all languages at least that attain their full development. That a great deal may be expressed by pictures and symbols, however, we learn from the picturing and picture-writing of past races that have come down to us, and from the present writing of the Chinese, who with their radical language have preserved the pictorial character that well accords with an early stage of language.

The Red Indians of North America have invented some very ingenious methods of picturing time and numbers. They have names for the thirteen moons or months into which they divide the year—Whirlwind moon, moon when the leaves fall off, moon when the fowls go to the south, etc., and when a hunter setting forth on a long expedition wished to leave a record of the time of his departure for a friend who should follow him on the same track, he carved on the bark of a tree a picture of the name of the moon, accompanied with such an exact representation of the state of the moon in the heavens on the night when he set out, that his friends had no difficulty in reading the date correctly. The Indians of Virginia kept a record of events in the form of a series of wheels of sixty spokes, each wheel representing the life of a man, sixty years being the average life of a man among the Indians. The spokes meant years, and on each one a picture of the principal occurrences of the year was drawn.

A missionary who accompanied Penn to Pennsylvania says that he saw a wheel, on one spoke of which the first arrival of Europeans in America was recorded. The history of this disastrous event for the Indians was given by a picture of a white swan spitting fire from its mouth. The swan, being a water-bird, told that the strangers came over the sea, its white plumage recalled the colour of their faces, and fire issuing from its mouth represented fire-arms, the possession of which had made them conquerors. The North American Indians also use rude little pictures, rough writing we may call it, to help them to remember songs and charms. Each verse of a song is concentrated into a little picture, the sight of which recalls the words to one who has once learned it. A drawing of a little man, with four marks on his legs and two on his breast, recalls the adverse charm, ‘Two days must you fast, my friend, four days must you sit still.’ A picture of a circle with a figure in the middle represents a verse of a love-song, and says to the initiated, ‘Were she on a distant island I could make her swim over.’ This sort of picturing seems to be very near writing, for it serves to recall words—but still only to recall them—it would not suggest the words to those who had never heard the song before; it is only an aid to memory, and its employers have only as yet taken the first step in the great discovery we are speaking of. The Mexicans, though they had attained to much greater skill than this in the drawing and colouring of pictures, had not progressed much further in the invention. Their picture-scrolls do not seem ever to have been more than an elaborate system of mnemonics, which, hardly less than the Peruvian quipus, required a race of interpreters to hand down their meaning from one generation to another. This fact makes us regret somewhat less keenly the decision of the first Spanish archbishop sent to Mexico, who, on being informed of the great store of vellum rolls, and folds on folds of cloth covered with paintings, that had been discovered at Anahuac, the chief seat of Mexican learning, ordered the entire collection to be burnt in a heap—a mountain heap, the chroniclers of the time call it—lest they should contain incantations or instructions for the practice of magical arts. As some excuse for this notion of the archbishop’s, we will mention the subjects treated of in the five books of picture-writing which Montezuma gave to Cortez:—the first book treated of years and seasons; the second of days and festivals; the third of dreams and omens; the fourth of the naming of children; the fifth of ceremonies and prognostications.