The Beginnings of Libraries

by Ernest Cushing Richardson

§ 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.

After the war trophies and perhaps before them, the most significant class of offerings was that of the first fruits which ranged through the whole field of human production from the fruit of mines, fields, orchards, vineyards, hunting, fisheries, flocks, up through the trades of fuller, potter, baker, tanner, shipwright, wash-woman, butcher, cook, basket-maker, shoemaker, and so on up to professional men, recorders and the first copy of literary works. When possible the offering might be and was originally in kind, but when not, as in the case of the physician or the recorder, it would be in the shape of money or, more likely in the case of the physician, an image in some valuable substance of the particular operation or disease for which fee was received (e.g. the golden tumors which the Philistines sent to the Jewish shrine). These were extremely common as the free-will offerings or vow payments among those who had been healed. When money began to take the place of barter the replacing of objects by their money value with registry of same in the books of the temple grew with it and became the tithe-tax still familiar in the English language and English society.

An extremely interesting library aspect of these (votive) collections is the actual phonetically written books which were laid up. These can be best illustrated from the Greek collections of books dedicated, but have their precise technical equivalent in the books which Joshua, Samuel, or Moses “laid up” before Jehovah, and indeed the technical term is precisely that for putting a book into a library or a document into the archives. The Greek collections included literary works, prize poems, hymns to Dionysus, Apollo, Asclepius, etc. These may have been of a strictly votive character, and this is true of many other works by Pindar, Hesiod, Heraclitus, Aristomache, Aristotle, Agathias, Alcaeus, and Solon which may perhaps be first fruits. This might also be true, of course, of the astronomy of Eudoxus, the astronomical table of Onopides, the calculations of Xenocrates and the log book of Hanno. But these at least point to very varied contents of these “votive” libraries. These examples above mentioned were on varied materials as well, including at least lead, gold, marble, and bronze, apparently, as well as papyrus or leather. Some of the works were in shorthand. While it is not easy to conceive of literary works as first fruits in the earlier period of the primitive writing and for the reason that such forms are themselves a later development, many of the mnemonic objects preserved in primitive collections certainly stand for prayers and hymns as well as narrative records and in the collections of sacred liturgical objects these represented set liturgical forms of words or dramatic procedures which are books in quite a developed sense.

A curiously interesting suggestion which seems to throw light on the literary meaning of votive objects is the statement by Miss Harrison that the sacred tokens of Zeus as god of the storeroom were symbols, not statues, and probably sacred tokens such as those carried in chests at the sacred processions,—magic spells in short, kept in a jar for the safeguarding of the storeroom. The farther identification of these with the ambrosia and with Zeus himself seems to make rather clear that many of the collections of sacred emblems are verbal documents. The relation of this to what was before said of the keeping of books in jars is obvious, and the fact is suggested that many of the so-called collections of votive offerings are of this character, that is, mnemonic objects, perhaps actual collections of verbal forms.

Libraries for the dead are most familiar and most highly developed in the Egyptian burial customs. From a very early date various books, generally known in their collected state now as chapters of the Book of the Dead, were always buried with the important dead. Another famous example of this burial of phonetic books with the dead is found in the so-called Orphic or Petalian gold tablets, found at various points from Asia Minor to Italy. The most interesting class, however, from our point of view is the large quantities of quipus which have been found in the Peruvian graves.