It does not, of course, follow that the earliest documents were not also religious as well as business and political, or even religious as distinguished from the political. Actual evidence, so far as it goes, seems to point to trophy records and votive records,—and votive records of first fruits or other useful or valuable objects “laid up” are economic records, but the parallel evidence as to priest king, the evidence as to religious sanction for the protection of objects, the hypothesis of priestly guidance in the tribal meal for fair apportionment of spoils, etc., point to religious supervision of economic matters. In the savage state the rule is that when food is scanty the strong eat what they want and the weak starve—the rule of the wolf pack. The germ of all social order is perhaps the rule that the weak also shall share in limited food. Founded possibly in selfishness—the will to keep the weak alive for selfish reasons, it involves at least power of individual self-control, the considering of remoter ends and a certain social-consciousness. The right sharing of food supply requires a strong hand under savage conditions and every possible sanction of authority. It was quite natural therefore that the common meal “before God” which plays such a large part in primitive custom should grow up—and equally natural that it should be the symbol of peace. The priest, standing for God, divided the offering—no doubt in the beginning the whole food supply—and perhaps “kept” the natural relics of the feast in the way of skins and bones.
Provisionally therefore one may venture the hypothesis that the actual beginnings of record collections were economic under religious direction,—and are to be found in the remains of tribal feasts “before God” although it may be fair to say that the rudiments of the matter already existed when the strong hand of the head of the family or tribe insisted on a fair distribution of food. Specht (p. 11) speaks of the bones of sacrifices as “the oldest approaches to a sort of writing”, and of course, the bones on the family plates, so to speak, were as truly records of the parts assigned to them, so far as they went (and if their portions had bones) as the bones of sacrifices! But then there is of course the farther question: Did the first savage who denied himself for the sake of one of the weak not have the religious motive, and did not the first man who forced a tribe of his fellows to do the same, need to use the religious sanction and invoke the fear of God as well as of his own right arm? And then, equally of course, there is the farther question whether the first man was a savage at all.
In the golden age before the mild and carnivorous Abel, before even his fruitiverous and murderous older brother, before the Fall when all were still fruit eaters and fruit eaters only, the tabu was—religious prohibition and religious sanction. And that tabu was on the apples of Iduna, the fruit of the tree of knowledge between good and evil, which springs from the fountains of memory and reflection,—the golden apples of strife which some say give immortality, some death. What is this tree whose fruit is tangible knowledge, the food of the gods and which was in the beginning with the first man, but a library, and what did those old philosophizers mean by what they set down about the first man and the way they put it? Did they mean that what is food for one is poison for another or simply that to break tabu spells death whether it is body food tabu or mind food tabu? Truth to tell the germ of the library is as early as man’s mind—at least.
Back to this point, the beginning of man, we have actual literary “authority” in the person of Specht at least, and nearly back to this point we have good archaeological sources for our collections of written records. There is, however, no authority in literature or in the sources, so far as this lecturer knows, for carrying conjecture back into the territory of the pithecanthropos, who, however, must have made and left similar involuntary records of his gastronomic activities, but who presumably never observed them or appointed them for memorial purposes.
§ 19. The administration of primitive libraries
The question of where and by whom and how books were kept and made ready for users is not one that has been very much discussed although the questions who were the librarians and where were the books kept has been more or less implied in the discussions of temple versus secular collections. Mr. Tedder’s dictum that “these records would naturally be preserved in sacred places, and accordingly the earliest libraries of the world were probably temples and the earliest librarians priests” is modified and perhaps at the same time confirmed by the history of pre-phonetic libraries. It is true that in primitive tribes the medicine man is generally a keeper of records, but it is true also that among the Mexican Indians certainly, and pretty clearly among North American Indian tribes and in many African tribes, the shaman or medicine man is not the only keeper of records. It is true also that in the early Egyptian practice the priests were the keepers of the books whether it was in the temple, archives or the palace archives, but even here it seems to be the fact that there were military records, department records, and local administrative records in the different nomes kept by scribes who were not priests.
The keeping of records must in fact have begun before there was any special place, even the simplest hut or medicine wigwam or cave, set apart for distinctively religious purposes, although the setting apart of such places is apparently as old as the caves of the Stone Age. With these qualifications, the history of votive offerings tends to confirm the statement that the earliest public or tribal libraries were religious and the corresponding librarians the priests.
In very early times, and in much later times among primitive peoples, even the art of writing itself was often kept as a secret mystery in the custody of priests. The name “hieroglyphics” points in this same direction, and the temple collections of sacred books, the so-called books of Thoth and books of Hermes, point in the same direction. In general, however, this monopoly of letters seems rather to have been a deliberate assumption by the priests, as it is sometimes assumed by savage royalty, rather than the original situation. It applies, of course, rather to newly devised kinds of symbols, such as the vast number of systems of secret writing which have been evolved in all ages, than to the ordinary current record methods. That some of the earliest libraries were secret libraries, however, is an interesting fact, and one which may throw light on the mysterious collections of shrines and portable collections of objects in the liturgical processions in Egypt.
The methods used by these priest librarians for keeping and using the books form in themselves an interesting and little studied subject of very considerable extent.
The different kinds of writing required different sorts of receptacles. The book chest or bookcase, from which has come through the Greek the common word for library in languages other than English, was the most universal and natural way of keeping almost every kind of tangible record. The wooden chests and clay chests of the earliest historical periods must have extended well back into the pre-phonetic period and have also been found among primitive and semi-civilized peoples. They can obviously be used for quipus, message sticks, or almost any portable document. The same is true of the clay jar so often used in the earliest historical period. In the case of wandering tribes, however, less rigid or fragile materials are certainly better, and the book pouch was, therefore, in very early, and probably much earlier use than either boxes or jars. The skin pouch, like the skin water jar, is naturally suggested and easily made. This early form survives in the medicine bag, the lawyer’s green bag, and the schoolboy’s bag as well as in mail pouches for post-office use.