The Beginnings of Libraries

by Ernest Cushing Richardson

All these libraries should be clearly distinguished from other collections of buried books, such as those which the Jews made of worn and mutilated books. They are distinctly collections made for the use of the dead. Some of them are for use during the journey to the Elysian fields, the garden of Aalu, or the happy hunting grounds, some apparently rather for use after reaching them. The Egyptian books are rather clearly associated with the idea of the amulets and the other written charms, though on a higher plane. The idea seems to have been that the deceased should learn them by heart and recite them at various points as passwords for admission to the various gates or to pass various defenders of paradise. The Petalian tablets are precisely of the same character. In the case of the quipus, and of symbolic emblems generally, the analogy is perhaps rather to be found in the Egyptian models of tools and servants, and the hunting weapons buried with the North American Indians, also children’s playthings everywhere, where the point seems to be to supply the dead with their customary instruments for use after they have arrived in paradise.

Other objects of dress, ornament, etc., found in graves, strongly suggest the similar collection during life, where clothing and ornament is personal record of events or achievements in a man’s life. Probably not all grave collections include the same elements, but it seems likely that all three elements of personal record, guides to paradise, and libraries for paradise, are to be recognized at one point or another.

The quipus form the clearest example, and the long history of knot amulets suggests that they may have been intended primarily to play precisely the same part that the various parts or chapters of the Book of the Dead played. The equally extensive use, however, of knots for records or reminders, as in the mnemonic fringes, allows the possibility of the individual personal record, and there is, of course, also the possibility that the graves in which they were found were the graves of tribal recorders or reciters who carried with them the implements of their trade in the same spirit that the hunting weapons were carried, or, on the other hand, in the spirit of the suicide of a king’s servants that they might serve him in the other world, and of the Ushabtiu substitutes for this. These models of servants, boats, war implements, and the like, in graves seem to be precisely analogous to the miniatures substituted for actual objects in votive offerings.

Burial with the dead of a person’s favorite belongings has also to be reckoned with in interpreting these collections. Sometimes all a man’s favorite possessions were buried with him, and it not infrequently happens in modern civilized times that a person has a favorite ornament or possession buried with him. It was only yesterday that a man provided for having his cremated body sunk in his favorite yacht.

§ 18. Contents of primitive libraries

The various kinds of documents in the several sorts of primitive writing found in the different species of collections have been indicated under the various headings. It is worth while however to gather these up together a little and especially in view of the question of actual origin.

It has been noted that collections of quipu, message sticks, fetishes, personal ornaments, skin calendars, totems, votive objects and other pictorial or mnemonic records in temples, graves, medicine tents, private wigwams, etc., include, in pre-phonetic times, records of personal exploits and events in personal history, family histories, and tribal histories, hymns, prayers, amulets, financial accounts, and economic records of various sorts, annual registers, contracts, astronomical observations, etc.

All this has its bearing on the actual origin of libraries. Messrs. Tedder and Brown in their excellent article in the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica say that “the earliest use to which the invention of inscribed or written signs was put was probably to record important religious and political transactions”. Now as a matter of fact, the conscious record of events and transactions selected as important for the knowledge of posterity, or even, what was probably a much earlier matter, for evidence of contract or practical memorandum, represents a rather late stage in the evolution of record. It is likely that there were many record collections before this stage was reached, trophy, votive, etc., object records and economic records of various sorts.

In point of fact as King remarks of the earliest Sumerian records, a large quantity of the earliest records are land deeds, and any one who looks over the cuneiform documents will be impressed with the fact that an enormously large proportion of the existing documents of the early historical period are contracts or lists of cattle or, as in the Cretan excavation, labels, or lists of arrows and other materials laid up in storehouses. Among Egyptian documents too, the annals of the Palermo stone, the earliest systematic annals of Egypt, which incorporate earlier documents from its own time (say 2700 B.C.) to six or seven centuries farther back, are to a considerable extent filled with memoranda of census lists of cattle taken and other lists of possessions. It has already been noticed that among the commonest earliest uses of notch, knot and pebble systems was use for the record of cattle or other numerical lists of possessions.

It would be jumping at conclusions to say that the conventional sign attached to or accompanying the pre-historic animal paintings of the caves were numbers. They may quite likely be ownership marks. It is a curious fact, which has recently been commented on, that these animal paintings are of domestic animals and if so the ownership marks themselves would be pictures of the marks actually branded upon the animals just as such marks are still branded on cattle on the plains and by New England farmers on their sheep. The fact that the tendency seems to be to regard the contents of these caves as religious, and the use of the caves as for religious purposes, suggests an analogy with votive offerings. If the marks are in fact numbers, the combination of figure and number suggests at once the innumerable lists of animals in the Babylonian temple records. Ownership marks themselves are, of course, not records of events but economic records and are very common before the use of phonetic writing. One very large class of these is the pottery mark which was first applied apparently by the man who made them for himself as an ownership mark and then, as one became more skilled in one thing and another and barter began, it passed into the trade-mark of manufacturers which has survived in the modern trade-mark system.