Anthropology

by Edward B. Tylor

Fig. 73.—Ancient Egyptian Potter’s Wheel (Beni Hassan).

The examination here made of the modes of cooking requires some notice of vessels. For water-vessels men can make shift without the art of the potter, using joints of bamboo, coco-nut shells, calabash rinds, buckets scooped out of wood, pails of bark, bottles of skin. The horseman in desert regions carries his water-gourd at his saddle-bow, and even where a glass imitation has come in, the French go on calling it a gourde, just as we keep up the name of the old leather bottle for the glass ones we use now. It was one of the greatest household inventions to make earthen pots to stand the fire for boiling. When and where pottery was invented, is too far back to say. On the sites of ancient dwellings, wherever earthenware was in use, potsherds may be picked up in the ground. Where they are not to be found, as among the relics of tribes of the reindeer-period in the caves of France, it may be safely concluded that these early savages had not come so far in civilization. The same is true of the Australians, Fuegians, and many other modern savages who had no pottery, and no broken bits in their soil to show that their predecessors ever had. One asks, how did men first hit upon the idea of making an earthen pot? It may not look a great stretch of invention, but invention moved by slow steps in early culture, and there are some facts which lead to the guess that even pots were not made all at once. There are accounts of rude tribes plastering their wooden vessels with clay to stand the fire, while others, more advanced, moulded clay over gourds, or inside baskets, which being then burnt away left an earthen vase, and the marks of the plaiting remained as an ornamental pattern. It may well have been through such intermediate stages that the earliest potters came to see that they could shape the clay alone and burn it hard. This shaping was doubtless at first done by hand, as in America or Africa the native women may still be seen building up large and shapely jars or kettles from the bottom, moulding on the clay bit by bit. So in Europe, as any museum of antiquities shows, the funeral urns and other earthen vessels of the stone and bronze ages were hand-made; and even now tourists who visit the Hebrides buy earthen cups and bowls of an old woman who makes them in ancestral fashion without a potter’s wheel, and ornaments them with lines drawn with a pointed stick. Yet the potter’s wheel was known in the world from high antiquity. [Fig. 73] represents Egyptian potters at work, as shown in the wall-paintings of the Tombs of the Kings. It is seen that they turned the wheel by hand. So the Hindu potter is described as now going down to the river side when a flood has brought him a deposit of fine clay, when all he has to do is to knead a batch of it, stick up his pivot in the ground, balance the heavy wooden table on the top, give it a spin round, and set to work. It was an improvement on this simplest wheel to work it from below by the foot, and in our potteries a labourer drives it with a wheel and band, but the principle remains unchanged. As we watch with untiring pleasure the potter with this simple machine so easily bringing shape out of shapelessness, we can well understand how in the ancient world it seemed the very type of creation, so that the Egyptians pictured one of their deities as a potter moulding Man on the wheel. Fine art made some of its earliest and most successful efforts in shaping the earthen vase, engraving and moulding patterns or figures on it, and painting it with pictures of gods and heroes, or scenes from myth or daily life, so that much of our knowledge of such nations as Etruscans and even Greeks is derived from the paintings on their vases, art-relics almost everlasting though so fragile. A great part of the pottery of the world is still of the first and simplest kind, mere baked clay (Italian terra cotta) without glaze like our flower-pots, and therefore porous. To cure this fault, some people, as the Peruvians, varnished it, while even the Greeks often burnt in bitumen. The great improvement of glazing, that is, melting on a glassy coating in the furnace, was already known in ancient Egypt and Babylonia, while in later ages glazed earthenware reached high artistic excellence in the Persian ware and the majolica (from Majorca). In China a more perfect ware had been made above a thousand years before European potters got at the secret of imitating it. We call it china, or by the curious name porcelain, which originally meant a kind of oriental nacre or mother-of-pearl. China or porcelain dishes are made of fine white kaolin or porcelain clay, and fired so intensely that the ware becomes vitrified not only at the glazed surface but through the substance. The common principle in all these varieties of earthenware is that silica (which with alumina is present in all clay) forms fusible glassy silicates, which in terra cotta bind the mass together, and in glazed earthenware and china coat it on the surface or through.

Glass itself is a fusible silicate of this kind, the base being potash, soda, and sometimes lead. There is a fanciful story told by Pliny, describing its invention as having taken place on a sandy shore of Phœnicia, where a ship happening to be moored, the merchants finding no stones to boil their kettle on, brought on shore lumps of nitre with which the ship happened to be laden, whereupon the fire melted the silica and alkali into glass. But the fact is that glass-making was an Egyptian art ages before the rise of Phœnician commerce, and to all appearance the Phœnicians and other nations learnt it from thence. [Fig. 74] shows an Egyptian glass blower. Among other things he would have made flasks to be covered with reed, much like our present oil-flasks. The ancient Egyptians made glass beads, and variegated glass cups, which even the Venetian glassworks can hardly match. But modern Europe may claim the clever art of making crown glass for window-panes by twirling the red-hot blown globe till it opens in a circular sheet, and also the polishing of sheets of plate-glass, which make possible our great looking-glasses with their backs of brilliant tin amalgam.

Fig. 74.—Ancient Egyptian Glass-blowing (Beni Hassan).

Fire is so important a means in extracting metal from the ore and working it afterwards, that some account of the use of metal may properly come in this chapter. But in thinking how men were led to the difficult processes of smelting ores to extract the metal, it has to be remembered that some metals are found in the metallic state. Thus the native copper near Lake Superior was used in long-past ages by the tribes then living in the country, who treated bits of the metal as a kind of malleable stone, hammering it cold into hatchets, knives, and bracelets. The same is true of gold, natural nuggets of which can be beaten cold into ornaments. It is only a guess that metal-working may have begun in this simple way; still it seems a likely guess. Iron also is found in the metallic state, especially in the aerolites or meteoric stones which fall on the earth from time to time. Though in many of these the metal is apt to shiver to bits under the hammer, there is some meteoric and other native iron fit to be made into implements when heated white-hot in the forge, and it can even be to some extent worked cold. Some of the ores of metal are themselves so metallic-looking that the smith would attempt to work them in the fire, and this may have led to proper smelting. Thus magnetic iron ore not only looks like iron, but can be heated in the forge, and then and there hammered into such things as horse-shoes.

It is a question whether men first worked copper or iron. In classic times, indeed, people felt certain that bronze was in use before iron. This bronze is an alloy of copper with about a ninth of tin to harden it, what an English mechanic would now call “gun-metal.” An often-quoted line of Hesiod’s tells how the men of old worked in bronze when as yet black iron was not; and Lucretius, the Epicurean poet, taught that after the primitive time when men fought with sticks and stones, iron and bronze were discovered, but bronze was known before iron. However, the Greeks and Romans did not really remember very ancient times, and in some countries the use of iron was early. Egyptian and Babylonian inscriptions make mention of iron as well as copper. A piece of wrought iron taken out of the masonry of the great pyramid may be seen in the British Museum, and there are Egyptian pictures even showing the blue steel which the butcher had hanging at his side to sharpen his knife on. Now what is to be particularly noticed is that the Egyptians, though they thus had iron, mostly made their carpenters’ tools of bronze. Among the Homeric Greeks, the smiths knew of iron, and even of steel or steely iron, if one may judge so from the famous passage in the Odyssey (ix. 391), about the hissing of the axe as the smith dips it in the cold water to strengthen the iron. Yet all the while bronze was the ordinary material not only for the warrior’s armour and shield, but for his spear and sword. Clearly we have here a state of arts very unlike our own now, and it is worth while to try to understand the difference. An instructive remark in Kaempfer’s account of Japan near two centuries ago, may help to explain it, where he says that both copper and iron were smelted in the country, and were about the same price, so that iron tools cost as much as copper or brass ones. The state of things far back in the ancient world may have been something like this. Iron, though known, was hard to smelt from the ore, and Homer’s calling it the “much-wrought iron” shows how difficult the smiths found it to forge. But copper was plentiful, one well-known source being the island of Cyprus, whence its name of æs Cyprium (copper). Tin had not to be fetched from the ends of the world; there were mines in Georgia, Khorassan, and elsewhere in inner Asia, where perhaps the discovery was made of using it to harden copper into bronze. When once this had been hit upon, the ease with which bronze could be melted, and such things as hatchets cast in stone moulds, would make it more convenient than iron to the ancient artificer. This may have been the real reason why the “bronze age” set in over a great part of Europe and Asia, and was only followed by the “iron age” when iron coming to be better worked, cheaper and more plentiful, and steel especially being improved, brought out that superiority to bronze for tools and weapons which to us seems a matter of course. The remains of the lake-dwellings of Switzerland show how central Europe was once inhabited by rude tribes using stone implements, how at a later period bronze hatchets and spears prevailed, and lastly iron came in. Such, too, has been the history of the stone, bronze, and iron ages, traced by archæologists in the burial-places of old Scandinavia, whether the use of the new metals was learnt by the native nations or brought in by conquering invaders. Nations living in the bronze age are known to history, especially the Mexicans and Peruvians, whom the Spaniards at the conquest found working in bronze with some skill, but knowing nothing of iron; their state was like that of the Massagetæ of central Asia, described by Herodotus some two thousand years earlier. Most of Africa, on the other hand, seems to have had no bronze age, but to have passed directly from the stone age to the iron age. Iron-smelting seems to have come into Africa in the north, and only spread lately down to the Hottentots, who still remember in their stories the time when their ancestors used to cut down trees with stones. The Africans easily dig up their rich iron ore and smelt it with wood in simple furnaces which may be mere holes in the ground, the draught being generally by bellows. The primitive pair of bellows may there be seen, made of whole skins of goats or other animals, of which the one full of air is pressed or trodden on, while the empty one is pulled up to fill itself through a slit or valve. This shows iron-smelting not far from its rudest and probably earliest state. Among the various improvements which have now made iron more plentiful than in ancient times are the use of coke instead of charcoal for smelting; the introduction of cast-iron, which seems old in China, but was not common in England till the last century; the use of machinery for rolling and forging. The progress of steel-making has been such as lately to make it possible for railways to be laid down with steel at a penny a pound.

Other metals and their effect on civilization may be spoken of briefly. Silver has from ancient times been the companion of gold, as precious metals. Lead was easily extracted, and served the Romans for roofs and water-pipes. The alloy of copper and zinc was made by the Romans not by fusing together the two metals, but by heating copper with the zinc ore called calamine; the result was brass, an inferior kind of bronze. Quicksilver was known to the ancients, who distilled it from the red cinnabar, and understood its use in extracting gold and silver, and for gilding. Of the many metals which have become known in modern times some have practical uses. Thus platinum is valuable for vessels which have to bear extreme heat or resist the action of acids, and aluminium is useful for its remarkable lightness. But we still mostly depend on the metals whose origin is lost in antiquity—iron, copper, tin, lead, silver, and gold.

The mention of these last precious metals leads us to notice the important part which coin has had in developing civilization, and this again belongs to the general history of trade or commerce. The modern Englishman, accustomed to shops and counting-houses, hardly realises from what rude beginnings our complex commercial system arose. It is instructive to see trade in its lowest form among such tribes as the Australians. The tough greenstone, valuable for making hatchets, is carried hundreds of miles by natives who receive from other tribes in return the prized products of their districts, such as red ochre to paint their bodies with; they have even got so far as to let peaceful traders pass unharmed through tribes at war, so that trains of youths might be met, each lad with a slab of sandstone on his head to be carried to his distant home and shaped into a seed-crusher. When strangers visit a tribe, they are received at a friendly gathering or corrobboree, and presents are given on both sides. No doubt there is a general sense that the gifts are to be fair exchanges, and if either side is not satisfied there will be grumbling and quarrelling. But in this roughest kind of barter we do not yet find that clear notion of a unit of value which is the great step in trading. This higher stage is found among the Indians of British Columbia, whose strings of haiqua-shells, worn as ornamental borders to their dresses, serve them also as currency to trade with, a string of ordinary quality being reckoned as worth one beaver’s skin. In the Old World many traces have come down of the times when value was regularly reckoned in cattle; as where in the Iliad, in the description of the funeral games, we read of the great prize tripod that was valued at twelve oxen, while the female slave who was the second prize was only worth four oxen. Here the principle of unit of value is already recognised, for not only could the owner of oxen buy tripods and slaves with them, but also he who had a twelve-ox tripod to sell could take in exchange three slaves reckoned at four oxen each. To this day various objects of use or ornament pass as currency, especially where money is scarce. Thus the traveller in Abyssinia may have to buy what he wants with cakes of salt, while elsewhere in Africa he has to carry iron hoe-blades, pieces of cloth, and strings of beads as money. Cowry-shells are still small change in South Asia, as they have been since time immemorial. These things do more or less clumsily what metal money does so conveniently. The use of money arose out of gold and silver being in old times bartered by weight for goods, as may be seen in the pictures of the ancient Egyptians weighing in scales heaps of rings of gold and silver, which shows that these were not yet real money. It is thus still with much of the gold and silver traded with in the East, where the little ingots have to be weighed and reckoned for what each is worth. The invention of coin comes in when pieces of metal are made of a fixed weight and standard, and marked with a figure or inscription to certify them, so that they may be taken without weighing or testing. This looks a simple thing to do, but the old Egyptians and Babylonians are not known to have hit upon it. Perhaps the earliest money may have been the Chinese little marked cubes of gold, and the pieces of copper in the shapes of shirts and knives, as though intended to represent real shirts or knives. Coins appear in Lydia and Ægina, in their early form, as rude dumps of precious metal stamped on one side only with a symbol such as the tortoise, the other side showing the mark of the anvil or tool they were placed on to be struck, which accidental back-pattern came to be improved in later coins into the ornamental reverse. Art came on fast in coinage, so that among the most beautiful coins in the world are the gold staters of Philip of Macedon, with the laurel-crowned head on one side and the two-horse chariot on the other. But one reason why coins are no longer struck in such high relief is because they would be rubbed down by wear. The Roman as was not stamped but cast; it seems to have been at first a pound of copper, its name meaning “one” (as ace at cards still does). From early ages the coinage has been a government monopoly, and the practice soon began of lowering the standard and lessening the weight for the profit of the royal treasury. How this debasing the coinage was carried on in Europe by one king after another may be seen in the fact that the libra or pound of silver came down in value to the French livre or franc, worth tenpence, and to the “pound Scots,” worth twenty pence. Though changed in value, the coinage of old times may be traced on to the present day, in our still keeping accounts in the £ s. d. (libræ, solidi, denarii) of the Romans.

For small trading and at home, metal money answers well. But there is great trouble and risk in sending coin hundreds of miles to pay for goods bought at a distance. An easily carried substitute for gold and silver is the bank-note, a promise to pay so much, issued by the treasury or some banker, and passing as money from hand to hand. The Emperor of China appears to have issued such notes in exchange for treasure about the eighth century, and in the thirteenth century Marco Polo, the famous merchant-traveller in Tartary, describes the Great Khan’s money of stamped pieces of mulberry-bark. It is plain from this account that the notion of paper-money was still strange to the mind of an European trader, but since then bank-notes have become an important part of the world’s currency. Even more useful to commerce was the invention of bills of exchange. Suppose a merchant of Genoa to have sent silks to a merchant in London. He does not send for his money in return, but gives an order on a slip of paper that his correspondent in London, who owes him so much, is to pay it in so many days. This slip of paper is a bill of exchange, and is bought by another Genoese merchant who happens to owe money in London, and pays it by sending over the bill which claims the payment of the money there. Thus, instead of gold being sent backwards and forwards to pay for shipments between London and Genoa, one debt is set off against another. This is describing in its simplest form the system which is so worked in the exchanges of mercantile cities all over the world, that the immense transactions of commerce are carried on by mutual credit, with only so much actual travelling of gold and silver as is necessary to adjust the balances between the different countries.